Uma abordagem para representação e rastreio de artefatos.

Abstract

Requirements Traceability (RT) refers to the process of tracing requirements through the software development life-cycle. It is essential for the software development process because a lot of information is used and produced and it should be kept related or traceable. Nevertheless , as the complexity of a system increases, themyriad of related artifacts also increases. Therefore, one is encumbered of tracing requirements through different abstraction levels. Moreover, there is not a consensus about the traceability process and, as a consequence, requirements traceability practices cannot be unified across different organizational settings. Proposing a common abstraction to requirements traceability and also identifying common aspects to the requirements traceability process have been recognized as remarkable research topics of the grand challenges of requirements traceability. Therefore, is this work, we propose a Traceability Representation Language (TRL), which provides abstractions to requirements traceability. Such representation is then exploited by a requirements traceability process centered on it. Thus, by thoroughly discussing process’ phases, activities, actors, responsibilities, and input/output artifacts as well as traceability contracts, which govern process’ phases and how they intercommunicate, we investigate common aspects of requirements traceability. The evaluation of the present work was twofold: (i) the proposed language was evaluated considering its readability and writability, i.e. how comprehensible it is; and (ii) the proposed process was evaluated regarding its performance and effectiveness, i.e. how well it supports requirements traceability tasks. As a result, we observed that the language’s constructions were evaluated as easily read/written and that it is a feasible approach to provide an abstraction to requirements traceability. Moreover,we observed that the proposed process improves the performance and efficiency of the requirements traceability process, while maintaining the same accuracy of other approaches. Therefore, the proposed approach (language and process) is feasible to address abstractions to requirements traceability as well as foster the discussion of major aspects of the requirements traceability process, thus portable traceability can be addressed, i. e. how requirements traceability techniques can be used across different projects or even organizations.