Semantics of trace relations in requirements models for consistency checking and inferencing

Requirements traceability is the ability to relate requirements back to stakeholders and forward to corresponding design artifacts, code, and test cases. Although considerable research has been devoted to relating requirements in both forward and backward directions, less attention has been paid to relating requirements with other requirements. Relations between requirements influence a number of activities during software development such as consistency checking and change management. In most approaches and tools, there is a lack of precise definition of requirements relations. In this respect, deficient results may be produced. In this paper, we aim at formal definitions of the relation types in order to enable reasoning about requirements relations. We give a requirements metamodel with commonly used relation types. The semantics of the relations is provided with a formalization in first-order logic. We use the formalization for consistency checking of relations and for inferring new relations. A tool has been built to support both reasoning activities. We illustrate our approach in an example which shows that the formal semantics of relation types enables new relations to be inferred and contradicting relations in requirements documents to be determined. The application of requirements reasoning based on formal semantics resolves many of the deficiencies observed in other approaches. Our tool supports better understanding of dependencies between requirements

Traceability for Model Driven, Software Product Line Engineering

Traceability is an important challenge for software organizations. This is true for traditional software development and even more so in new approaches that introduce more variety of artefacts such as Model Driven development or Software Product Lines. In this paper we look at some aspect of the interaction of Traceability, Model Driven development and Software Product Line

Change Impact Analysis based on Formalization of Trace Relations for Requirements

Evolving customer needs is one of the driving factors in software development. There is a need to analyze the impact of requirement changes in order to determine possible conflicts and design alternatives influenced by these changes. The analysis of the impact of requirement changes on related requirements can be based on requirements traceability. In this paper, we propose a requirements metamodel with well defined types of requirements relations. This metamodel represents the common concepts extracted from some prevalent requirements engineering approaches. The requirements relations in the metamodel are used to trace related requirements for change impact analysis. We formalize the relations. Based on this formalization, we define change impact rules for requirements. As a case study, we apply these rules to changes in the requirements specification for Course Management System

<i>Trace++</i>: A Traceability Approach for Agile Software Engineering

Agile methodologies have been introduced as an alternative to traditional software engineering methodologies. However, despite the advantages of using agile methodologies, the transition between traditional and agile methodologies is not an easy task. There are several problems associated with the use of agile methodologies. Examples of these problems are related to (i) lack of metrics to measure the amount of rework that occurs per sprint, (ii) interruption of a project after several iterations, (iii) changes in the requirements, (iv) lack of documentation, and (v) lack of management control. In this paper we present Trace++, a traceability technique that extends traditional traceability relationships with extra information in order to support the transition between traditional and agile software development. The use of Trace++ has been evaluated in two real projects of different software development companies to measure the benefits of using Trace++ to support agile software development

Change Impact Analysis for SysML Requirements Models based on Semantics of Trace Relations

Change impact analysis is one of the applications of requirements traceability in software engineering community. In this paper, we focus on requirements and requirements relations from traceability perspective. We provide formal definitions of the requirements relations in SysML for change impact analysis. Our approach aims at keeping the model synchronized with what stakeholders want to be modeled, and possibly implemented as well, which we called as the domain. The differences between the domain and model are defined as external inconsistencies. The inconsistencies are propagated for the whole model by using the formalization of relations, and mapped to proposed model changes. We provide tool support which is a plug-in of the commercial visual software modeler BluePrint

A goal-oriented requirements modelling language for enterprise architecture

Methods for enterprise architecture, such as TOGAF, acknowledge the importance of requirements engineering in the development of enterprise architectures. Modelling support is needed to specify, document, communicate and reason about goals and requirements. Current modelling techniques for enterprise architecture focus on the products, services, processes and applications of an enterprise. In addition, techniques may be provided to describe structured requirements lists and use cases. Little support is available however for modelling the underlying motivation of enterprise architectures in terms of stakeholder concerns and the high-level goals that address these concerns. This paper describes a language that supports the modelling of this motivation. The definition of the language is based on existing work on high-level goal and requirements modelling and is aligned with an existing standard for enterprise modelling: the ArchiMate language. Furthermore, the paper illustrates how enterprise architecture can benefit from analysis techniques in the requirements domain

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research

A Systematic Review of Tracing Solutions in Software Product Lines

Software Product Lines are large-scale, multi-unit systems that enable massive, customized production. They consist of a base of reusable artifacts and points of variation that provide the system with flexibility, allowing generating customized products. However, maintaining a system with such complexity and flexibility could be error prone and time consuming. Indeed, any modification (addition, deletion or update) at the level of a product or an artifact would impact other elements. It would therefore be interesting to adopt an efficient and organized traceability solution to maintain the Software Product Line. Still, traceability is not systematically implemented. It is usually set up for specific constraints (e.g. certification requirements), but abandoned in other situations. In order to draw a picture of the actual conditions of traceability solutions in Software Product Lines context, we decided to address a literature review. This review as well as its findings is detailed in the present article.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures, 7 table