Establishing traceability links among software artefacts

Abstract

Artefact management in a software development process is a difficult problem in software engineering. Usually there is a wide variety of artefacts, which are maintained separately within a software development process such as requirement specifications, architectural concerns, design specifications, source codes and test cases to name a few. Artefact inconsistency is a major problem since these artefacts evolve at different rates. Maintaining traceability links among these artefacts and updating those artefacts accordingly can be a solution to address artefact inconsistency. There is a need for establishing these artefact traceability links in semi-automatic way. Proper management and visualization tool is required for effective software artefact management in an incremental software development. We provide a prototype tool to establish artefact traceability links and visualization. This paper describes the research methodology and relevant research carried out for semi-automatic traceability link establishment and visualization of software artefacts.