A Formal Approach for Traceability Preservation in Software Development Process

Traceability is the ability to trace the usage of artifacts during the software lifecycle process. Though the benefits of establishing a traceability software system have been widely recognized, it is difficult to be applied well in actual development. In this paper, we propose a new method for traceability preservation which may be used in the practical software development process. A formal model for the traceability of software artifacts is first presented, which consists of variable traceability relations, classification and version number controls. We then present the composition, restriction and refinement operations in the software development process. Next, the preservation of traceability under these three operations is discussed respectively. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we finally develop a prototype tool named Formalized Software Management System (FSMS).