Capturing tracing data life cycles for supporting traceability

Abstract

Activities for achieving traceability in software development projects include planning, implementing, using and maintaining a suitable strategy. Current research aims at supporting these activities by automating the involved tasks, processes and applications. In this paper, we present a concept for developing a flexible framework which enables the integration of respective functional modules, e.g. artifact data extractors and trace link generators, to form traceability environments according to the project's demands. By automating the execution of the framework's components and monitoring artifact-related interactions between developers and their tools, the tracing data's life cycle is captured and provided for further usages. This paper presents an exemplified framework setup which is used to demonstrate the path and enrichment of tracing data along these components. Furthermore, we discuss observations and findings which we made during defining and realizing the example. We aim at using this information to further improve the framework in order to support the implementation of traceability environments. © Copyright 2020 by SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved.