Traceability for managing evolutionary change

Traceability links can provide essential support for evolutionary development of software, beyond requirements engineering e.g. for reuse & design decisions, design and code comprehension, effort estimation, checks for completeness and project man-agement. For maximum support, traceability links are required not only for large grained artifacts but for fine grained ones as well. The establishment and the maintenance of these links is crucial, because inconsistent links prevent the aimed positive effects. However, a high effort for traceability links would inhibit the positive effects as well. In this paper, the state of the art approaches of definition and application of traceability links are investigated. They are integrated together with link update oper-ations within development methods. The investigation and the integrated approach was evaluated in various projects in research and industry in the fields of both forward and reverse engineering