Traceability helps stakeholders to understand the relationships that exist between software artifacts created during a software development project. For example, the evolution of the relationships between requirements and the components to which they are allocated can provide insight into the maintainability of a system. Unfortunately, due to the heterogeneous nature of these artifacts, creating, maintaining, and viewing these relationships is extremely difficult. We propose a new approach to traceability based on techniques from open hypermedia and information integration. Open hypermedia and information integration provide generic techniques for establishing, maintaining, and viewing relationships between software artifacts. Our approach allows the automated creation, maintenance, and viewing of traceability relationships in tools that software professionals are accustomed to using on a daily basis.
Susanne A. Sherba, Kenneth M. Anderson