Traceability approach for managing changes involving software testing artefacts

Abstract

Software change is inevitable for software product to remain relevant and reusable. As software evolves over time due to specific changes at any point in time during software development and maintenance, the managing aspect of changes may get more complicated and risky. The outdated links would cause the affected artefacts to be not updated timely and effectively. Most of the existing traceability approaches and tools are dedicated and limited to high level artefacts such as requirements and fewer capability made available to address the lower level artefacts such as classes and codes. Most maintainers limit their links to begin at the requirement perspective but there is no valid traceability link being made to support the fine grained level involving testing components. This thesis proposes a new traceability approach to manage changes with the emphasis on the integration of the development artefacts and testing artefacts. The working artefacts cover requirements, packages, classes, methods, test case, and codes. The proposed approach provides a know-how solution to the IEEE 829:2010 standards associated to testing that demands for the support at testing perspective. This approach has the capability to horizontally and vertically manage artefacts from requirement down to code and vice versa. The proposed traceability approach was applied to a case study of a software development project called On- Board Automobile (OBA) with a complete set of documentation including test cases. The evaluation results prove that the proposed traceability approach is significant and useful in managing software changes involving testing artefacts.