Towards Automated Traceability Maintenance in Model Driven Engineering

Traceability relations are used to understand the dependencies between the artifacts created during the development of a software system. In model driven Engineering (MDE), traceability relations may be generated implicitly or explicitly. When changes occur to the models, it is necessary that the traceability links must be maintained and must be evolved. The purpose of this paper is to propose an approach for the maintenance of trace links when a transformation was completely or partially invoked. In this paper, we have firstly described how traceability links can be stored and how can they be used in an MDE framework. Then we have proposed a traceability maintenance solution based on three main phases: (1) the model comparison phase, (2) the changes detection and classification phase, and (3) the evolution links phase. The proposed approach improves the process of maintaining traceability information in two major ways. First, traces are generated automatically by transformations. This makes the process of establishing traces faster and less error prone compared to manually assigning traces. Second, the (semi-) automated update of traceability relations over time as the software system evolves reduces the manual effort for maintaining traceability relations.