Expanding Tracing Capabilities Using Dynamic Tracing Data

Abstract

Software traceability enables gaining insight into artifact relationships and dependencies throughout software development. This information can be used to support project maintenance and to reduce costs, e.g. by estimating the impact of artifact changes. Many traceability applications require manual effort for creating and managing the necessary data. Current approaches aim at reducing this effort by automating various involved tasks. To support this, we propose an enrichment of tracing data by capturing interactions that influence the artifacts' life-cycle, which we refer to as dynamic tracing data. Its purpose is to expand capabilities of traceability applications and to enable assistance in development tasks. In this paper, we present our research methodology and current results, most importantly a flexible and modular framework for capturing and using dynamic tracing data, as well as an example scenario to demonstrate a possible implementation and usage of the framework. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.