Traceability support in software product lines

Abstract

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática.Traceability is becoming a necessary quality of any modern software system. The complexity in modern systems is such that, if we cannot rely on good techniques and tools it becomes an unsustainable burden, where software artifacts can hardly be linked to their initial requirements. Modern software systems are composed by a many artifacts (models, code, etc.). Any change in one of them may have repercussions on many components. The assessment of this impact usually comes at a high cost and is highly error-prone. This complexity inherent to software development increases when it comes to Software Product Line Engineering. Traceability aims to respond to this challenge, by linking all the software artifacts that are used, in order to reason about how they influence each others. We propose to specify, design and implement an extensible Traceability Framework that will allow developers to provide traceability for a product line, or the possibility to extend it for other development scenarios. This MSc thesis work is to develop an extensible framework, using Model-Driven techniques and technologies, to provide traceability support for product lines. We also wish to provide basic and advanced traceability queries, and traceability views designed for the needs of each user