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

Integrating the common variability language with multilanguage annotations for web engineering

Web applications development involves managing a high diversity of files and resources like code, pages or style sheets, implemented in different languages. To deal with the automatic generation of custom-made configurations of web applications, industry usually adopts annotation-based approaches even though the majority of studies encourage the use of composition-based approaches to implement Software Product Lines. Recent work tries to combine both approaches to get the complementary benefits. However, technological companies are reticent to adopt new development paradigms such as feature-oriented programming or aspect-oriented programming. Moreover, it is extremely difficult, or even impossible, to apply these programming models to web applications, mainly because of their multilingual nature, since their development involves multiple types of source code (Java, Groovy, JavaScript), templates (HTML, Markdown, XML), style sheet files (CSS and its variants, such as SCSS), and other files (JSON, YML, shell scripts). We propose to use the Common Variability Language as a composition-based approach and integrate annotations to manage fine grained variability of a Software Product Line for web applications. In this paper, we (i) show that existing composition and annotation-based approaches, including some well-known combinations, are not appropriate to model and implement the variability of web applications; and (ii) present a combined approach that effectively integrates annotations into a composition-based approach for web applications. We implement our approach and show its applicability with an industrial real-world system.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

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

An Introduction to Requirements Traceability

This report surveys the requirements traceability literature and gives some recommendations for further research and for an approach to consultancy concerning traceability in the 2RARE project. The problem of maintaining traceability in a development project is viewed as the problem of maintaining an information system that maintains the relevant links between items developed during the process. These items may vary from requirements to design and implementation documents. To develop and implement such an information system, we must identify the needs for tracking information, made a model of this information, design usage procedures for the system, and implement the system. Accordingly, the literature on traceability is organized under the headings needs, models and usage. Furthermore, tracking tools are briefly reviewed

Requirements Traceability: Recovering and Visualizing Traceability Links Between Requirements and Source Code of Object-oriented Software Systems

Requirements traceability is an important activity to reach an effective requirements management method in the requirements engineering. Requirement-to-Code Traceability Links (RtC-TLs) shape the relations between requirement and source code artifacts. RtC-TLs can assist engineers to know which parts of software code implement a specific requirement. In addition, these links can assist engineers to keep a correct mental model of software, and decreasing the risk of code quality degradation when requirements change with time mainly in large sized and complex software. However, manually recovering and preserving of these TLs puts an additional burden on engineers and is error-prone, tedious, and costly task. This paper introduces YamenTrace, an automatic approach and implementation to recover and visualize RtC-TLs in Object-Oriented software based on Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). The originality of YamenTrace is that it exploits all code identifier names, comments, and relations in TLs recovery process. YamenTrace uses LSI to find textual similarity across software code and requirements. While FCA employs to cluster similar code and requirements together. Furthermore, YamenTrace gives a visualization of recovered TLs. To validate YamenTrace, it applied on three case studies. The findings of this evaluation prove the importance and performance of YamenTrace proposal as most of RtC-TLs were correctly recovered and visualized.Comment: 17 pages, 14 figure

Toward an Effective Automated Tracing Process

Traceability is defined as the ability to establish, record, and maintain dependency relations among various software artifacts in a software system, in both a forwards and backwards direction, throughout the multiple phases of the project’s life cycle. The availability of traceability information has been proven vital to several software engineering activities such as program comprehension, impact analysis, feature location, software reuse, and verification and validation (V&V). The research on automated software traceability has noticeably advanced in the past few years. Various methodologies and tools have been proposed in the literature to provide automatic support for establishing and maintaining traceability information in software systems. This movement is motivated by the increasing attention traceability has been receiving as a critical element of any rigorous software development process. However, despite these major advances, traceability implementation and use is still not pervasive in industry. In particular, traceability tools are still far from achieving performance levels that are adequate for practical applications. Such low levels of accuracy require software engineers working with traceability tools to spend a considerable amount of their time verifying the generated traceability information, a process that is often described as tedious, exhaustive, and error-prone. Motivated by these observations, and building upon a growing body of work in this area, in this dissertation we explore several research directions related to enhancing the performance of automated tracing tools and techniques. In particular, our work addresses several issues related to the various aspects of the IR-based automated tracing process, including trace link retrieval, performance enhancement, and the role of the human in the process. Our main objective is to achieve performance levels, in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and usability, that are adequate for practical applications, and ultimately to accomplish a successful technology transfer from research to industry

Use of IBM Collaborative Lifecycle Management Solution to Demonstrate Traceability for Small, Real-World Software Development Project

The Standish Group Study of 1994 showed that 53 percent of software projects failed outright and another 31 percent were challenged by extreme budget and/or time overrun. Since then different responses to the high rate of software project failures have been proposed. SEI’s CMMI, the ISO’s 9001:2000 for software development, and the IEEE’s JSTD-016 are some examples of such responses. Traceability is the one common feature that these software development standards impose. Over the last decade, software and system engineering communities have been researching subjects such as developing more sophisticated tooling, applying information retrieval techniques capable of semi-automating the trace creation and maintenance process, developing new trace query languages and visualization techniques that use trace links, applying traceability in specific domains such as Model Driven Development, product line systems and agile project environment. These efforts have not been in vain. The 2012 CHAOS results show an increase in project success rate of 39% (delivered on time, on budget, with required features and functions), and a decrease of 18% in the number of failures (cancelled prior to completion or delivered and never used). Since research has shown traceability can improve a project’s success rate, the main purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate traceability for a small, real-world software development project using IBM Collaborative Lifecycle Management. The objective of this research was fulfilled since the case study of traceability was described in detail as applied to the design and development of the Value Adjustment Board Project (VAB) of City of Jacksonville using the scrum development approach within the IBM Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management Solution. The results may benefit researchers and practitioners who are looking for evidence to use the IBM CLM solution to trace artifacts in a small project

Visualization representation benefits of pre-requirement specification tractability

Representation of Pre-RST information is very useful using visualization elements for realization of benefits of requirements tractability This improves the practitioners motivation to maintain Pre-RST information during life cycle processes. Few researchers proposed visualization for post-RST due to which many benefits of requirements tractability cannot be realized. This paper proposed an important visualization representing Pre-RST information that demonstrate various benefits of requirements tractability. In order to evaluate empirically an experiment is conducted and textual representation of tractability information is obtained. In order to strengthen our claim a survey is conducted to compare textual representation of tractability information with proposed visualization and results are compiled