C# Traceability System

Traceability information is a valuable asset that software development teams can leverage to minimise their risk during production and maintenance of software projects. When maintainers are added to a software project post-production, they have to learn the system from scratch and understand its dynamics before they can begin making appropriate modifications to the source code. The system outlined in this paper extracts traceability information directly from the source code of C# projects, and presents it in such a way that it can be easily used to understand the logic and validate changes to the system

Toward Visualization and Analysis of Traceability Relationships in Distributed and Offshore Software Development Projects

Offshore software development projects provoke new issues to the collaborative endeavor of software development due to their global distribution and involvement of various people, processes, and tools. These problems relate to the geographical distance and the associated time-zone differences; cultural, organizational, and process issues; as well as language problems. However, existing tool support is neither adequate nor grounded in empirical observations. This paper presents two empirical studies of global software development teams and their usage of tools. The results are then used to motivate and inform the construction of more useful software development tools. The focus is on issues that are tool-related but have not yet been solved by existing tools. The two software tools presented as solutions, Ariadne and TraVis, explicitly address yet unresolved issues in global software development and also integrate with prevalent other solutions

Recovering from a Decade: A Systematic Mapping of Information Retrieval Approaches to Software Traceability

Engineers in large-scale software development have to manage large amounts of information, spread across many artifacts. Several researchers have proposed expressing retrieval of trace links among artifacts, i.e. trace recovery, as an Information Retrieval (IR) problem. The objective of this study is to produce a map of work on IR-based trace recovery, with a particular focus on previous evaluations and strength of evidence. We conducted a systematic mapping of IR-based trace recovery. Of the 79 publications classified, a majority applied algebraic IR models. While a set of studies on students indicate that IR-based trace recovery tools support certain work tasks, most previous studies do not go beyond reporting precision and recall of candidate trace links from evaluations using datasets containing less than 500 artifacts. Our review identified a need of industrial case studies. Furthermore, we conclude that the overall quality of reporting should be improved regarding both context and tool details, measures reported, and use of IR terminology. Finally, based on our empirical findings, we present suggestions on how to advance research on IR-based trace recovery

A model-driven traceability framework for software product lines

International audienceSoftware product line (SPL) engineering is a recent approach to software development where a set of software products are derived for a well defined target application domain, from a common set of core assets using analogous means of production (for instance, through Model Driven Engineering). Therefore, such family of products are built from reuse, instead of developed individually from scratch. SPL promise to lower the costs of development, increase the quality of software, give clients more flexibility and reduce time to market. These benefits come with a set of new problems and turn some older problems possibly more complex. One of these problems is traceability management. In the Europe an AMPLE project we are creating a common traceability framework across the various activities of the SPL development. We identified four orthogonal traceability dimensions in SPL development, one of which is an extension of what is often considered as "traceability of variability". This constitutes one of the two contributions of this paper. The second contribution is the specification of a metamodel for a repository of traceability links in the context of SPL and the implementation of a respective traceability framework. This framework enables fundamental traceability management operations, such as trace import and export, modification, query and visualization. The power of our framework is highlighted with an example scenari

A Model-Driven Visualization Tool for Use with Model-Based Systems Engineering Projects

Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) promotes increased consistency between a system's design and its design documentation through the use of an object-oriented system model. The creation of this system model facilitates data presentation by providing a mechanism from which information can be extracted by automated manipulation of model content. Existing MBSE tools enable model creation, but are often too complex for the unfamiliar model viewer to easily use. These tools do not yet provide many opportunities for easing into the development and use of a system model when system design documentation already exists. This study creates a Systems Modeling Language (SysML) Document Traceability Framework (SDTF) for integrating design documentation with a system model, and develops an Interactive Visualization Engine for SysML Tools (InVEST), that exports consistent, clear, and concise views of SysML model data. These exported views are each meaningful to a variety of project stakeholders with differing subjects of concern and depth of technical involvement. InVEST allows a model user to generate multiple views and reports from a MBSE model, including wiki pages and interactive visualizations of data. System data can also be filtered to present only the information relevant to the particular stakeholder, resulting in a view that is both consistent with the larger system model and other model views. Viewing the relationships between system artifacts and documentation, and filtering through data to see specialized views improves the value of the system as a whole, as data becomes informatio

A Model Driven Reverse Engineering Framework for Extracting Business Rules out of a Java Application

International audienceIn order to react to the ever-changing market, every organization needs to periodically reevaluate and evolve its company policies. These policies must be enforced by its Information System (IS) by means of a set of business rules that drive the system behavior and data. Clearly, policies and rules must be aligned at all times but unfortunately this is a challenging task. In most ISs implementation of business rules is scattered among the code so appropriate techniques must be provided for the discovery and evolution of evolving business rules. In this paper we describe a model driven reverse engineering framework aiming at extracting business rules out of Java source code. The use of modeling techniques facilitate the representation of the rules at a higher-abstraction level which enables stakeholders to understand and manipulate them

Extracting Business Rules from COBOL: A Model-Based Framework

International audienceOrganizations rely on the logic embedded in their Information Systems for their daily operations. This logic implements the business rules in place in the organization, which must be continuously adapted in response to market changes. Unfortunately, this evolution implies understanding and evolving also the underlying software components enforcing those rules. This is challenging because, first, the code implementing the rules is scattered throughout the whole system and, second, most of the time documentation is poor and out-of-date. This is specially true for older systems that have been maintained and evolved for several years (even decades). In those systems, it is not even clear which business rules are enforced nor whether rules are still consistent with the current organizational policies. In this sense, the goal of this paper is to facilitate the comprehension of legacy systems (in particular COBOL-based ones) by providing a model driven reverse engineering framework able to extract and visualize the business logic embedded in them