Traceability plays an important role in the development and assurance of software systems that permeate our society. It helps to assure that an as-built system correctly implements all requirements by supporting change impact assessment, re-engineering of applications, and other critical software engineering activities. Although previous work has focused on delivering point solutions that address specific traceability issues, this research will develop a new, powerful traceability model, Traceability+, that will deliver value-added traceability services designed to support diverse stakeholders as they perform critical software engineering activities. To accomplish this, the investigators will develop a new traceability query language and associated query mechanism, identify stakeholders' traceability-related needs, develop traceability services to meet those needs, build a knowledge base of traceability tasks and related queries, and handle varied data formats. If successful, the research could transform the community?s understanding of traceability and its benefits across the software engineering lifecycle. The evaluation of the proposed framework and dissemination of results is enhanced by having industry personnel actively participate as senior staff on the project and by an already-established Center of Excellence for Software Traceability.
Traceability plays an important role in the development and assurance of software systems that permeate our society. It helps to assure that an as-built system correctly implements all requirements by supporting change impact assessment, re-engineering of applications, and other critical software engineering activities. Previously, researchers have focused on delivering point solutions that address specific traceability issues. In contrast, the research conducted here developed a new and powerful traceability model that will delivers value-added traceability services designed to support diverse stakeholders as they perform critical software engineering activities. For example, to fully realize the potential usefulness of traceability between software artifacts we feel that one must be able to ask questions about the current state of a system in the context of traceability. That is, the traceability links and the artifacts represent a graph and we want to easily query this graph to determine the state of the system. There are a number of pertinent questions one can ask. Is a particular requirement actually implemented in the design and realized by source code? How does a change impact the requirements? How does a change to the requirements impact the safety of the system? Is a given set of requirements covered by test cases? These questions rely on the ability to construct and ask queries on the traceability between artifacts. To support this challenge a unified query language for traceability was developed. The language, TQL, is based in XML and supports queries across multiple artifacts and multiple traceability link types. A number of primitives are defined to allow complex queries to be constructed and executed. This query language is now being applied to real world projects with an industry partner (ABB Inc.) to fully investigate its practicality and usefulness. Results are disseminated broadly through outreach endeavors by the Center of Excellence for Software Traceability and scientific publications. In addition to the concrete benefits to industry, this project also served to unite research that cross-cuts the maintenance, testing, requirements, and visualization research communities. This in itself is a benefit that is anticipated to create opportunities for further collaborations and increase our ability to address traceability problems.
