Getting Back to Basics: Promoting the Use of a Traceability Information Model in Practice

It is widely assumed that following a process is a good thing if you want to achieve and exploit the benefits of trace-ability on a software development project. A core com-ponent of any such process is the definition and use of a traceability information model. Such models provide guid-ance as to those software development artifacts to collect and those relations to establish, and are designed to ulti-mately support required project analyses. However, trace-ability still tends to be undertaken in rather ad hoc ways in industry, with unpredictable results. We contend that one reason for this situation is that current software develop-ment tools provide little support to practitioners for building and using customized project-specific traceability informa-tion models, without which even the simplest of processes are problematic to implement and gain the anticipated ben-efits from. In this paper, we highlight the typical decisions involved in creating a basic traceability information model, suggest a simple UML-based representation for its defini-tion, and illustrate its central role in the context of a model-ing tool. The intent of this paper is to re-focus attention on very practical ways to apply traceability information mod-els in practice so as to encourage wider adoption. 1