A Streamlined, Cost-Effective Database Approach to Manage Requirements Traceability

Requirements traceability offers many benefits to software projects, and it has been identified as critical for successful development. However, numerous challenges face the implementation of traceability in the software engineering industry. Some of these challenges can be overcome through organizational policy and procedure changes, but the lack of cost-effective traceability models and tools remains an open problem. Many methods of implementing traceability exist, but each implementation method has its own limitations. A novel, cost-effective solution for the traceability tool problem is proposed, prototyped and tested in a case study using an actual aviation software project. Quantitative metrics from the case study are presented and a qualitative analysis is performed to demonstrate the viability of the proposed solution for the traceability tool problem. The results show that the proposed method offers significant advantages over implementing traceability manually or using existing commercial traceability approaches

Traceability support in software product lines

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática.Traceability is becoming a necessary quality of any modern software system. The complexity in modern systems is such that, if we cannot rely on good techniques and tools it becomes an unsustainable burden, where software artifacts can hardly be linked to their initial requirements. Modern software systems are composed by a many artifacts (models, code, etc.). Any change in one of them may have repercussions on many components. The assessment of this impact usually comes at a high cost and is highly error-prone. This complexity inherent to software development increases when it comes to Software Product Line Engineering. Traceability aims to respond to this challenge, by linking all the software artifacts that are used, in order to reason about how they influence each others. We propose to specify, design and implement an extensible Traceability Framework that will allow developers to provide traceability for a product line, or the possibility to extend it for other development scenarios. This MSc thesis work is to develop an extensible framework, using Model-Driven techniques and technologies, to provide traceability support for product lines. We also wish to provide basic and advanced traceability queries, and traceability views designed for the needs of each user

A framework for active software engineering ontology

The passive structure of ontologies results in the ineffectiveness to access and manage the knowledge captured in them. This research has developed a framework for active Software Engineering Ontology based on a multi-agent system. It assists software development teams to effectively access, manage and share software engineering knowledge as well as project information to enable effective and efficient communication and coordination among teams. The framework has been evaluated through the prototype system as proof-of-concept experiments

Using scenarios to support traceability

Software traceability is a recognized challenge in software development that can be ameliorated with requirements management tools. Traceability information can be used in a number of different software engineering activities such as software change impact analysis and testing One main challenge in the automation of software testing is mapping modeling concepts to code concepts. The level of granularity and the semantics supported by available requirements management tools do not, however, fully support such mapping, or more sophisticated requirement change impact analysis. Scenarios have been used as an alternative (and sometimes complementary) way to express requirements and system behavior throughout the phases of software development. Scenarios are used with different representation and semantics across software phases, and these can be related. This paper argues for exploring scenarios as one means for tracing requirements to code, and using this information to leverage automation of activities that benefit from traceability such as change impact analysis and software testing