Managing Traceability for Software Life Cycle Processes

Various types of software artifacts are produced in the software life cycle processes. Although traceability between different artifacts is beneficial for software development, the actual practice of modeling and maintaining traceability is not always entirely successful. In this paper, we explore how to manage traceability for the software life cycle process, including a new solution for formally constructing and preserving traceability under various management operations. Such a solution allows flexibility and extensibility to define new types of traceability links (dependency relationships). Its traceability information does not pollute the inner relationships of existing artifacts. We first present a formal model called a structure model that is used to describe software systems, and then a traceability concept is formally defined. Based on the structure model, we investigate in theory how to preserve traceability under various management operations. Finally, a prototype tool is developed for supporting our work.