Traceability-based change awareness

Abstract

Many tools in software engineering projects support the visualization and collaborative modification of custom sets of artifacts. This includes tools for requirements engineering, UML tools for design, project management tools, developer tools and many more. A key factor for success in software engineering projects is the collective understanding of changes applied to these artifacts. To support this, there are several strategies to automatically notify project participants about relevant changes. Known strategies are limited to a fixed set of artifacts and/or make no use of traceability information to supply change notifications. This paper proposes a change notification approach based on traceability in a unified model and building upon operation-based change tracking. The unified model explicitly combines system specification models and project management models into one fully traceable model. To show the benefit of our approach we compare it to related approaches in a case study. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.