title: Towards automated traceability maintenance.
abstract: Traceability relations support stakeholders in understanding the dependencies between artifacts created during the development of a software system and thus enable many development-related tasks. To ensure that the anticipated benefits of these tasks can be realized, it is necessary to have an up-to-date set of traceability relations between the established artifacts. This goal requires the creation of traceability relations during the initial development process. Furthermore, the goal also requires the maintenance of traceability relations over time as the software system evolves in order to prevent their decay. In this paper, an approach is discussed that supports the (semi-) automated update of traceability relations between requirements, analysis and design models of software systems expressed in the UML. This is made possible by analyzing change events that have been captured while working within a third-party UML modeling tool. Within the captured flow of events, development activities comprised of several events are recognized. These are matched with predefined rules that direct the update of impacted traceability relations. The overall approach is supported by a prototype tool and empirical results on the effectiveness of tool-supported traceability maintenance are provided.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Systems Engineering and Automation (SEA), Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria.
authors.forename: Patrick
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Mäder
authors.forename: Orlena
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Gotel
keywords: Event-based development activity recognition; Model changes; Requirements traceability; Rule-based traceability maintenance; Software system evolution; Traceability decay; Traceability maintenance