Towards Querying of Traceability Information in the Context of Software Evolution

Abstract: Traceability of various artifacts created during the development of software systems plays an important role in software evolution. Subsequent changes to artifacts must be traced to other artifacts potentially affected by the change, thus ensuring the system’s consistency or enabling to estimate the impact of changes. Using a querying approach, this paper shows how to extract traceability information on the basis of an integrated metamodel. The metamodel allows for the representation of artifacts such as requirements, design models, or code. It may also be customized in order to accommodate for specific needs.