Data Lineage Approach of Multi-version Documents Traceability in Complex Software Engineering

Abstract

Due to the large amount of documents and versions in complex software engineering, it is very difficult to find and manage documents. In order to simplify the process of people finding and managing documents, this paper proposes a new documents organization mechanism, called DLROM, which provides dynamic and adaptive multi-version documents traceability management. DLROM introduces a new documents traceability approach based on the idea of Data Lineage, which draws on PROV Model to describe the software engineering documents and their relationship, establishes Lineage Relationship Model between documents, realizes the traceability of documents in the whole process of software development. DLROM automatically manages multi-version documents in traceability, avoiding editors manually maintaining document relationships. Finally, the paper proves that DLROM has the characteristics of low labor cost, comprehensive tracking dimension, appropriate tracking granularity and unified expression mechanism.