Lean requirements traceability automation enabled by model-driven engineering

Abstract

Background The benefits of requirements traceability, such as improvements in software product and process quality, early testing, and software maintenance, are widely described in the literature. Requirements traceability is a critical, widely accepted practice. However, very often it is not applied for fear of the additional costs associated with manual efforts or the use of additional tools. Methods This article presents a “low-cost” mechanism for automating requirements traceability based on the model-driven paradigm and formalized by a metamodel for the creation and monitoring of traces and an integration process for traceability management. This approach can also be useful for information fusion in industry insofar that it facilitates data traceability. Results This article extends an existing model-driven development methodology to incorporate traceability as part of its development tool. The tool has been used successfully by several companies in real software development projects, helping developers to manage ongoing changes in functional requirements. One of those projects is cited as an example in the paper. The authors’ current work leads them to conclude that a model-driven engineering approach, traditionally used only for the automatic generation of code in a software development process, can also be used to successfully automate and integrate traceability management without additional costs. The systematic evaluation of traceability management in industrial projects constitutes a promising area for future work.

Coping with Verification in Complex Engineered Product Development

“…(Whyte, Stasis, and Lindkvist 2016), (Efe and Demirors 2019), (Meyer et al 2013), (Ali and Kidd 2014) , (Ali and Kidd 2013) Traceability Traceability is required to trace root cause errors, performance deficiencies, sufficient functionality, and the source of changes. (Mohan et al 2008), (Königs et al 2012), (Escalona, et al 2022), (Tufail et al 2017), (Mäder and Egyed 2015) Testing and Integration…”