Semi-automated traceability maintenance: An architectural overview of traceMaintainer

traceMaintainer is a tool that supports an approach for maintaining post-requirements traceability relations after changes have been made to traced model elements. The up- date of traceability relations is based upon predefined rules, where each rule is intended to recognize a development ac- tivity applied to a model element. Little manual effort or interaction with the developer is required. traceMaintainer can currently be used with a number of commercial software development tools and enables the update of traceability re- lations stored within these tools. This paper provides an overview of traceMaintainer's architecture and major com- ponents. change events and requires an interface for querying and updating traceability relations. The change event interface will be used by a tool-specific event generator that recog- nizes changes to model elements and collects data about the changed element in order to create change events for the rule engine. The required query and update interface also has to be implemented by a tool-specific adapter. Depend- ing on where the traceability relations are stored, the adapter gives access to relations stored within the model or to an external relationship repository such as EXTESSY Tool- NET. In the prototype, we have implemented our own trace- STORE repository that stores relations within the tool, but provides significantly more functionality in terms of trace- ability than the base modeling tool itself. In addition, a rule engine reads a rule catalog stored in XML format. This catalog can be edited and validated with a specific rule editor. Each of the major components is de- scribed further in this paper.