A scoped approach to traceability management

Traceability is the ability to describe and follow the life of a software artifact and a means for modeling the relations between software artifacts in an explicit way. Traceability has been successfully applied in many software engineering communities and has recently been adopted to document the transition among requirements, architecture and implementation. We present an approach to customize traceability to the situation at hand. Instead of automating tracing, or representing all possible traces, we scope the traces to be maintained to the activities stakeholders must carry out. We define core traceability paths, consisting of essential traceability links required to support the activities. We illustrate the approach through two examples: product derivation in software product lines, and release planning in software process management. By using a running software product line example, we explain why the core traceability paths identified are needed when navigating from feature to structural models and from family to product level and backward between models used in software product derivation. A feasibility study in release planning carried out in an industrial setting further illustrates the use of core traceability paths during production and measures the increase in performance of the development processes supported by our approach. These examples show that our approach can be successfully used to support both product and process traceability in a pragmatic yet efficient way.     

Towards automated traceability maintenance

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.     

从领域需求到产品线体系结构的映射——一种面向特征的方法

领域需求之间的依赖关系对软件产品线的体系结构有很大的影响,在已有的面向特征的管理产品线需求依赖的方法中很少有研究从需求到产品线体系结构的映射.基于一种特征依赖的分类方法,提出了从领域需求到特征,以及从特征到产品线体系结构的映射规则.通过这些映射规则,一致的需求通过映射得到一致的产品线核心资产,从而减少产品线中核心资产的不一致性并增加产品线的复用程度.用金融领域的现货交易产品线作为实例说明这个方法的实用性.     

面向软件安全性需求分析过程的追踪模型

追踪性即关联一些制品及其中各种相关要素的机制或能力。安全关键系统开发不仅包括一般系统的开发过程,更重要的是必需要有独立的安全性分析,建立并验证系统的安全性需求。目前针对安全性分析过程的追踪性研究较少。安全相关标准如ARP-4761和DO 178C等提供了安全性分析过程的指导意见,然而其由于涉及的概念和方法很多,因此在实际应用和研究中常会忽略对一些关键信息的追踪。此外,软件安全性需求分析不仅应考虑系统到软件的安全性分析,还应考虑软件到系统的安全性分析。面向软件安全性需求分析过程建立安全性相关信息的双向追踪,有助于了解安全性需求的前因后果,为验证工作和影响分析提供便利。参照标准,构建面向软件安全性需求分析过程的追踪模型。     

Automating the product derivation process of multi-agent systems product lines

Agent-oriented software engineering and software product lines are two promising software engineering techniques. Recent research work has been exploring their integration, namely multi-agent systems product lines (MAS-PLs), to promote reuse and variability management in the context of complex software systems. However, current product derivation approaches do not provide specific mechanisms to deal with MAS-PLs. This is essential because they typically encompass several concerns (e.g., trust, coordination, transaction, state persistence) that are constructed on the basis of heterogeneous technologies (e.g., object-oriented frameworks and platforms). In this paper, we propose the use of multi-level models to support the configuration knowledge specification and automatic product derivation of MAS-PLs. Our approach provides an agent-specific architecture model that uses abstractions and instantiation rules that are relevant to this application domain. In order to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach, we have implemented it as an extension of an existing product derivation tool, called GenArch. The approach has also been evaluated through the automatic instantiation of two MAS-PLs, demonstrating its potential and benefits to product derivation and configuration knowledge specification.     

Design-code traceability recovery: selecting the basic linkage properties

Traceability ensures that software artifacts of subsequent phases of the development cycle are consistent. Few works have so far addressed the problem of automatically recovering traceability links between object-oriented (OO) design and code entities. Such a recovery process is required whenever there is no explicit support of traceability from the development process. The recovered information can drive the evolution of the available design so that it corresponds to the code, thus providing a still useful and updated high-level view of the system.

Automatic recovery of traceability links can be achieved by determining the similarity of paired elements from design and code. The choice of the properties involved in the similarity computation is crucial for the success of the recovery process. In fact, design and code objects are complex artifacts with several properties attached. The basic anchors of the recovered traceability links should be chosen as those properties (or property combinations) which are expected to be maintained during the transformation of design into code. This may depend on specific practices and/or the development environment, which should therefore be properly accounted for.

In this paper different categories of basic properties of design and code entities will be analyzed with respect to the contribution they give to traceability recovery. Several industrial software components will be employed as a benchmark on which the performances of the alternatives are measured.     

Decision support for the software product line domain engineering lifecycle

Software product line engineering is a paradigm that advocates the reusability of software engineering assets and the rapid development of new applications for a target domain. These objectives are achieved by capturing the commonalities and variabilities between the applications of the target domain and through the development of comprehensive and variability-covering feature models. The feature models developed within the software product line development process need to cover the relevant features and aspects of the target domain. In other words, the feature models should be elaborate representations of the feature space of that domain. Given that feature models, i.e., software product line feature models, are developed mostly by domain analysts by sifting through domain documentation, corporate records and transcribed interviews, the process is a cumbersome and error-prone one. In this paper, we propose a decision support platform that assists domain analysts throughout the domain engineering lifecycle by: (1) automatically performing natural language processing tasks over domain documents and identifying important information for the domain analysts such as the features and integrity constraints that exist in the domain documents; (2) providing a collaboration platform around the domain documents such that multiple domain analysts can collaborate with each other during the process using a Wiki; (3) formulating semantic links between domain terminology with external widely used ontologies such as WordNet in order to disambiguate the terms used in domain documents; and (4) developing traceability links between the unstructured information available in the domain documents and their formal counterparts within the formal feature model representations. Results obtained from our controlled experimentations show that the decision support platform is effective in increasing the performance of the domain analysts during the domain engineering lifecycle in terms of both the coverage and accuracy measures.     

A study to support agile methods more effectively through traceability

Traceability is recognized to be important for supporting agile development processes. However, after analyzing many of the existing traceability approaches it can be concluded that they strongly depend on traditional development process characteristics. Within this paper it is justified that this is a drawback to support adequately agile processes. As it is discussed, some concepts do not have the same semantics for traditional and agile methodologies. This paper proposes three features that traceability models should support to be less dependent on a specific development process: (1) user-definable traceability links, (2) roles, and (3) linkage rules. To present how these features can be applied, an emerging traceability metamodel (TmM) will be used within this paper. TmM supports the definition of traceability methodologies adapted to the needs of each project. As it is shown, after introducing these three features into traceability models, two main advantages are obtained: 1) the support they can provide to agile process stakeholders is significantly more extensive, and 2) it will be possible to achieve a higher degree of automation. In this sense it will be feasible to have a methodical trace acquisition and maintenance process adapted to agile processes.     

Traceability and management of dispersed product knowledge during design and manufacturing

Product development processes comprise highly creative and knowledge-intensive tasks that involve extensive information exchange and communication among geographically distributed teams. Due to the geographical and institutional separation between the different systems involved in the product lifecycle, product knowledge sharing is becoming a key issue in the information systems of extended enterprises. This paper addresses the issue and challenges of product knowledge traceability during the product development. The aim of this research effort is to enhance the sharing and use of product knowledge acquired during the development process using traceability information.A standardized approach is proposed to trace and share product knowledge and key constructs to support traceability during the product development process are identified and formalized. This research effort is based on the premise that an important step towards achieving product knowledge sharing is providing traceability across various product knowledge elements that are used in product development phases, i.e. design and manufacturing. Two disjointed but complementary case studies illustrating the benefit of traceability are presented. The potential role of traceability is described, first to support the decision making process during engineering change management (ECM), and second to support product-oriented modelling for knowledge sharing and exchanging to meet the quality requirements. The proposed approach has been implemented using the MEGA Suite tool and applied to each of the case studies and could be integrated to PLM systems currently in use.     

A model-driven traceability framework for software product lines

Software product line (SPL) engineering is a recent approach to software development where a set of software products are derived for a well defined target application domain, from a common set of core assets using analogous means of production (for instance, through Model Driven Engineering). Therefore, such family of products are built from reuse, instead of developed individually from scratch. SPL promise to lower the costs of development, increase the quality of software, give clients more flexibility and reduce time to market. These benefits come with a set of new problems and turn some older problems possibly more complex. One of these problems is traceability management. In the European AMPLE project we are creating a common traceability framework across the various activities of the SPL development. We identified four orthogonal traceability dimensions in SPL development, one of which is an extension of what is often considered as “traceability of variability”. This constitutes one of the two contributions of this paper. The second contribution is the specification of a metamodel for a repository of traceability links in the context of SPL and the implementation of a respective traceability framework. This framework enables fundamental traceability management operations, such as trace import and export, modification, query and visualization. The power of our framework is highlighted with an example scenario.     

A holistic approach to feature modeling for product line requirements engineering

Requirements engineering (RE) offers the means to discover, model, and manage the requirements of the products that comprise a product line, while software product line engineering (SPLE) offers the means of realizing the products’ requirements from a common base of software assets. In practice, however, RE and SPLE have proven to be less complementary than they should. While some RE techniques, particularly goal modeling, support the exploration of alternative solutions, the appropriate solution is typically conditional on context and a large product line may have many product-defining contexts. Thus, scalability and traceability through into product line features are key challenges for RE. Feature modeling, by contrast, has been widely accepted as a way of modeling commonality and variability of products of a product line that may be very complex. In this paper, we propose a goal-driven feature modeling approach that separates a feature space in terms of problem space and solution space features, and establish explicit mappings between them. This approach contributes to reducing the inherent complexity of a mixed-view feature model, deriving key engineering drivers for developing core assets of a product line, and facilitating the quality-based product configuration.     

Assessment of a Product Range Model concept to support design reuse using rule based systems and case based reasoning

Knowledge reuse is recognised as a key element to support agile and effective decision-making processes during product development. The provision of information and knowledge for reuse relies on defined information structures and requires computational techniques that enable the reuse process within an integrated environment. Although, representing, saving, and sharing information is relatively well known for product modelling, it is accepted that effective and agile product development also requires knowledge sharing. For this reason, extensions of the Product Model structure are required to support specific product development process phases. This work argues that a product information model combined with extended knowledge models can provide decision support throughout the product development phases. This paper presents the results of an investigation into a specific extended knowledge model concept, named a Product Range Model (PRM), which combines both rule based systems and case based reasoning to provide product design decision support. Two product development scenarios, injection moulding and friction materials, have been selected in order to evaluate the ideas presented. For both applications the relevance of the models to support the capture and reuse of information and knowledge is stressed.     

基于体系结构的应用系统族开发方法的研究

对于建筑领域管理系统这样具有共同特性的一组应用系统的开发,如果没有系统性重用的方法,不仅会造成软件资产的大量浪费,而且也使系统的成本和开发周期大大增加。为解决上述问题,该文提出了一套以体系结构为中心的工程化软件开发方法,该方法利用软件产品线开发的思想,将软件产品线工程和应用工程两种开发活动集成到一起,通过族体系结构的重用实现系统性重用。     

Dynamic decision models for staged software product line configuration

Software product line engineering practices offer desirable characteristics such as rapid product development, reduced time-to-market, and more affordable development costs as a result of systematic representation of the variabilities of a domain of discourse that leads to methodical reuse of software assets. The development lifecycle of a product line consists of two main phases: domain engineering, which deals with the understanding and formally modeling of the target domain, and application engineering that is concerned with the configuration of a product line into one concrete product based on the preferences and requirements of the stakeholders. The work presented in this paper focuses on the application engineering phase and builds both the theoretical and technological tools to assist the stakeholders in (a) understanding the complex interactions of the features of a product line; (b) eliciting the utility of each feature for the stakeholders and hence exposing the stakeholders’ otherwise implicit preferences in a way that they can more easily make decisions; and (c) dynamically building a decision model through interaction with the stakeholders and by considering the structural characteristics of software product line feature models, which will guide the stakeholders through the product configuration process. Initial exploratory empirical experiments that we have performed show that our proposed approach for helping stakeholders understand their feature preferences and its associated staged feature model configuration process is able to positively impact the quality of the end results of the application engineering process within the context of the limited number of participants. In addition, it has been observed that the offered tooling support is able to ease the staged feature model configuration process.     

A logical approach to systems engineering artifacts: semantic relationships and dependencies beyond traceability—from requirements to functional and architectural views

Not only system assurance drives a need for semantically richer relationships across various artifacts, work products, and items of information than are implied in the terms “trace and traceability” as used in current standards and textbooks. This paper deals with the task of working out artifacts in software and system development, their representation, and the analysis and documentation of the relationships between their logical contents—herein referred to as tracing and traceability; this is a richer meaning of traceability than in standards like IEEE STD 830. Among others, key tasks in system development are as follows: capturing, analyzing, and documenting system-level requirements, the step to functional system specifications, the step to architectures given by the decomposition of systems into subsystems with their connections and behavioral interactions. Each of these steps produces artifacts for documenting the development, as a basis for a specification and a design rationale, for documentation, for verification, and impact analysis of change requests. Crucial questions are how to represent and formalize the content of these artifacts and how to relate their content to support, in particular, system assurance. When designing multi-functional systems, key artifacts are system-level requirements, functional specifications, and architectures in terms of their subsystem specifications. Links and traces between these artifacts are introduced to relate their contents. Traceability has the goal to relate artifacts. It is required for instance in standards for functional system safety such as the ISO 26262. An approach to specifying semantic relationships is shown, such that the activity of creating and using (navigating through) these relationships can be supported with automation.     

Towards a traceability model in a MARTE-based methodology for real-time embedded systems

This paper addresses the traceability management in the context of Accord_|UML, a MARTE-based methodology for designing distributed real-time embedded systems. Our contribution is two fold: on the one hand, we propose to include directly requirements in the modeling process; on the other hand, we identify potential traceability links that we model by using the SysML requirement profile. We also present the toolbox that supports our contribution. This work is partly funded by the French Research Agency (ANR) in the context of the “Réseau National des Technologies Logicielles” support within both MeMVaTEx and Domino Projects.     

Standard process monitoring and traceability programming in collaborative CAD/CAM/CNC manufacturing scenarios

The paper focuses on collaborative STEP-based CAD/CAM/CNC supply chains to program and automate machining process data monitoring and traceability activities. A traceability interface (traceability nc_functions) is defined for the new CNC programming standard ISO STEP-NC. CAM systems will be able to program monitoring and data access activities by inserting traceability nc_function calls in CNC programs. On the shop floor, controllers will automatically interpret these nc_functions to access process data while machining and will relate data records with the corresponding machining operations in a STEP-NC part program. With both types of information—process data and standard machining program (STEP-NC part program)—spread and technologically heterogeneous engineering systems will have full knowledge about what has happened in production. Traceability data access automation will assure data reliability. The paper describes a traceability scenario where standards such as MTConnect and ISA-95 support, rather than interfere with, the STEP-NC traceability proposal.     

A code tagging approach to software product line development

Software product line engineering seeks to systematise reuse when developing families of similar software systems so as to minimise development time, cost and defects. To realise variability at the code level, product line methods classically advocate usage of inheritance, components, frameworks, aspects or generative techniques. However, these might require unaffordable paradigm shifts for developers if the software was not thought at the outset as a product line. Furthermore, these techniques can be conflicting with a company’s coding practices or external regulations. These concerns were the motivation for the industry–university collaboration described in this paper in which we developed a minimally intrusive coding technique based on tags. The approach was complemented with traceability from code to feature diagrams which were exploited for automated configuration. It is supported by a toolchain and is now in use in the partner company for the development of flight-grade satellite communication software libraries.     

以项目为中心的面向对象复用支持

现有的软件复用技术通常是围绕着库来组织利用标准的和通用的可复用资源.例如,面向对象编程环境中的类库和通用构件库.然而,这种以库为中心的复用方式在一定程度上忽略了可复用资源的项目相关信息,而项目相关信息记录了可复用资源的应用语境(Application Context).应用语境有利于可复用资源的理解和使用.为此,提出了一种围绕着一个项目的文档来组织和利用可复用资源的复用途径,即以项目为中心的文档复用,用以支持在相同应用领域中一族软件的开发.探讨了当前的面向对象方法在支持文档复用方面的一些局限性,提出了一种