Using tactic traceability information models to reduce the risk of architectural degradation during system maintenance

Mirakhorli, Mehdi; Cleland‐Huang, Jane

doi:10.1109/icsm.2011.6080779

Cited by 27 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…All of these individual trace creation patterns provide useful guidance for improving the effectiveness of the traceability effort; however longer term benefits can be realized if traceability knowledge is documented and reused through implementing the Build-a-tTIM pattern. Our current work in this area involves creating and validating a generic library of tTIMs for commonly used tactics [35].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Solution: Use the infrastructure of the tTIMs and their traces to concrete architectural elements to visualize architectural decisions [35]. Present relevant architectural decisions to developers using the visual format of the developed tTIM.…”

Section: Visualize Intentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Solution: Register all critical architectural elements with a central coordinator, monitor those elements for modifications, and generate informational messages to keep the maintainer informed of underlying architectural decisions [35,7,9]. This pattern is typically implemented through automatically registering any architectural elements that are traced to elements in a tactic.…”

Section: Active Plumblinementioning

confidence: 99%

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A pattern system for tracing architectural concerns

Mirakhorli

Cleland‐Huang

2011

Proceedings of the 18th Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs

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A software architecture is carefully designed to satisfy the quality concerns of its stakeholders, and as such, represents a systematic and intricately balanced set of design decisions which deliver required qualities such as performance, reliability, and safety. In practice, architectural degradation tends to occur over the lifetime of the software system, as developers make ongoing and incremental maintenance changes to the system without knowledge of its underlying design decisions. Fortunately, this problem can be alleviated by establishing traceability between concrete elements in the architecture and their associated design decisions, and then using these traceability links to keep developers informed of relevant architectural tactics, styles, and design patterns throughout the development process. This paper focuses on the task of creating and using such traceability links. We present six trace creation patterns describing techniques and supporting structures for creating architecturally significant traceability links, and two usage patterns describing techniques for using the created links to help preserve qualities in the architectural design. The patterns described in this paper emerged from our experiences and observations of tracing architectural concerns in safety critical systems.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Visualize Intentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Active Plumblinementioning

confidence: 99%

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A pattern system for tracing architectural concerns

Mirakhorli

Cleland‐Huang

2011

Proceedings of the 18th Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs

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“…Traceability has been used as a technique for supporting software maintenance activities [13], [14], [15], [16], [17] by linking artifacts. The links are often based on common keywords between the artifacts [15], [18].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Managing Security Control Assumptions Using Causal Traceability

Nhlabatsi

Zisman

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE/ACM 8th International Symposium on Software and Systems Traceability

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Abstract-Security control specifications of software systems are designed to meet their security requirements. It is difficult to know both the value of assets and the malicious intention of attackers at design time, hence assumptions about the operational environment often reveal unexpected flaws. To diagnose the causes of violations in security requirements it is necessary to check these design-time assumptions. Otherwise, the system could be vulnerable to potential attacks. Addressing such vulnerabilities requires an explicit understanding of how the security control specifications were defined from the original security requirements. However, assumptions are rarely explicitly documented and monitored during system operation. This paper proposes a systematic approach to monitoring design-time assumptions explicitly as logs, by using traceability links from requirements to specifications. The work also helps identify which alternative specifications of security control can be used to satisfy a security requirement that has been violated based on the logs. The work is illustrated by an example of an electronic patient record system.

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“…The specification of required traceability information Mäder et al 2009a] is commonly used for traceability planning [Mirakhorli and Cleland-Huang 2011;Delater and Paech 2013;Nejati et al 2012]. As discussed in Section 2.6, existing approaches Mäder et al 2009a] do not provide support for linking the required traceability information to its purpose.…”

Section: Purposedmentioning

confidence: 99%