Process of product fragments management in distributed development

Abstract

Management of product constituent fragments is essential for large scale logically or physically distributed projects. Geographically distributed development projects have special settings and needs - special attention has to be given to artifacts management because developers are likely to use different representation formats and a variety of tools for the artifact production. The question is: how can artifacts in different representation formats be related and managed? Methodological support for artifacts management and traceability is presented in this paper. Product fragments from different development phases (i.e., requirements specification, design, code, test scenarios, and documentation) are interrelated through a conceptual domain model. Domain model is proposed as a means to capture information content despite heterogeneous representation. Given, a domain model with intra-related concepts and artifacts associated to the concepts we are able to interrelate heterogeneous artifacts and to predict and assess how one altered artifact may impact other artifacts. The approach covers the whole lifecycle of a system, enables artifacts' management by associating them according semantics contained inside. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.