A preliminary study of software traceability referance model using feature modeling

Abstract

Traceability, a key aspect of any engineering discipline, enables engineers to understand the relations and dependencies among various artifacts in a system. It is a well-known fact that even in organizations and projects with mature software development processes, software artifacts created as part of these processes end up to be disconnected from each other. From a software engineer’s perspective, it therefore becomes essential to establish and maintain the semantic connections among these artifacts. The missing traceability among software artifacts becomes a major challenge for many software engineering activities. As a result, during the comprehension of existing software systems, software engineers have to spend a large amount of effort on synthesizing and integrating information from various sources to establish links among these artifacts. Existing research in software traceability focuses on reducing the cost associated with this manual effort by developing automatic assistance in establishing and maintaining traceability links among software artifacts. This research is based on the premise that a more effective and unified solution to manage traceability semantic link information can be achieved by considering a feature model as the traceability reference model. The aim of this research is to propose a software traceability reference model that can store traceability links information using the concept of feature modeling. It identifies the traces of software components of various software artifacts such as design and requirements and stores them in hierarchical form.