Model-based traceability

Many organizations invest considerable cost and effort in building traceability matrices in order to comply with regulatory requirements or process improvement initiatives. Unfortunately, these matrices are frequently left un-used and project stakeholders continue to perform critical software engineering activities such as change impact analysis or requirements satisfaction assessment without benefit of the established traces. A major reason for this is the lack of a process framework and associated tools to support the use of these trace matrices in a strategic way. In this position paper, we present a model-based approach designed to help organizations gain full benefit from the traces they develop and to allow project stakeholders to plan, generate, and execute trace strategies in a graphical modeling environment. The approach includes a standard notation for capturing strategic traceability decisions in the form of a graph, and also notation for modeling reusable trace queries using augmented sequence diagrams. All of the model elements, including project specific data, are represented using XML. The approach is demonstrated through examples from a traffic simulator project composed of requirements, UML class diagrams, code, test cases, and test case results.