Requirements traceability in model-driven development: Applying model and transformation conformance

The variety of design artifacts (models) produced in a model-driven design process results in an intricate relationship between requirements and the various models. This paper proposes a methodological framework that simplifies management of this relationship, which helps in assessing the quality of models, realizations and transformation specifications. Our framework is a basis for understanding requirements traceability in model-driven development, as well as for the design of tools that support requirements traceability in model-driven development processes. We propose a notion of conformance between application models which reduces the effort needed for assessment activities. We discuss how this notion of conformance can be integrated with model transformations

Knowledge Extraction from Natural Language Requirements into a Semantic Relation Graph

Knowledge extraction and representation aims to identify information and to transform it into a machine-readable format. Knowledge representations support Information Retrieval tasks such as searching for single statements, documents, or metadata. Requirements specifications of complex systems such as automotive software systems are usually divided into different subsystem specifications. Nevertheless, there are semantic relations between individual documents of the separated subsystems, which have to be considered in further processes (e.g. dependencies). If requirements engineers or other developers are not aware of these relations, this can lead to inconsistencies or malfunctions of the overall system. Therefore, there is a strong need for tool support in order to detects semantic relations in a set of large natural language requirements specifications. In this work we present a knowledge extraction approach based on an explicit knowledge representation of the content of natural language requirements as a semantic relation graph. Our approach is fully automated and includes an NLP pipeline to transform unrestricted natural language requirements into a graph. We split the natural language into different parts and relate them to each other based on their semantic relation. In addition to semantic relations, other relationships can also be included in the graph. We envision to use a semantic search algorithm like spreading activation to allow users to search different semantic relations in the graph

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

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

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

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

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications