Introducing a multifaceted traceability approach to support software evolution

Abstract

Software traceability is becoming increasingly significant element in software development life cycle. From the software evolution point of view, software traceability is one of importance factor in facilitating software evolution. Unfortunately, practicing software traceability is much harder than it would appear. On the other hand, software evolution is inevitable since software must be continually changed to remain satisfactory in use. Research has shown that evolution is the most expensive activity in the software process. Therefore, in order for software to remain useful in its business domain, it has to utilize some support mechanisms to facilitate software evolution process. This position paper aims at hypothesizing that utilizing a multifaceted approach to traceability generation and recovery can provide significant support for facilitating software evolution process. The multifaceted traceability approach contains three main facets that compose the whole traceability approach, and are run on top of a particular ready-to-use integrated environment development (IDE) in order to facilitate the traceability generation and recovery as well as to ease the artifacts maintenance.