TRL: a traceability representation language

Requirements Traceability (RT) refers to the process of tracing requirements through the software development life-cycle. It is essential for the software development process because a lot of information is used and produced and it should be kept related or traceable. Nevertheless, as the complexity of a system increases, the myriad of related artifacts also increases. Therefore, one is encumbered of tracing requirements through different abstraction levels. Proposing a common abstraction to the requirements traceability process and also providing query mechanisms to retrieve trace links has been recognized as one of the grand challenges of RT. Hence, in this paper, we propose a Traceability Representation Language (TRL), which provides abstractions to requirements, artifacts and trace links as well as queries, through which trace links can be searched, retrieved and filtered. To evaluate the proposed language, we have conducted an empirical experiment comparing TRL with other traceability languages, namely TracQL and TQL. We observed the readability and writability of the languages as well as their trace links representations and query declarations and concluded that the proposed TRL language is a feasible abstraction to the RT process. As a final remark, we discuss how the proposed language contributes towards portable and scalable traceability.