Traceability

Abstract

In this chapter, we introduce traceability, which can be defined as the ability to help stakeholders understand the associations and dependencies that exist among entities created or used during a software development process. Typically, these associations and dependencies are represented as traceability relationships between the artefacts or models to be traced. Today, traceability is recognised as being essential for various tasks related to software engineering, such as project management, quality assurance, and maintenance. This chapter will present a comprehensive and generic approach to traceability, supporting all relevant traceability-related activities and allowing for the custom definition of semantically rich traceability relationship types. An interesting feature of the approach is technology-independent, i.e., adaptable to model-driven software development (MDSD)—as well as ontology-based technologies, making it usable for ontology-driven software development. Taking these three attributes together, the traceability approach is referred to as being universal.