Using Runtime Introspectible Metadata to Integrate Requirement Traces and Design Traces in Software Components

Software engineering produces different artifacts, such as requirement specifications, design documents, source code, documentation, test cases, binaries, etc. In today's software engineering practice the produced artifacts are usually not well integrated and only little trace information is available that explicitly describes the dependencies of different system parts represented in these artifacts. Thus, in case of a change request it is hard to rapidly find the relevant artifacts and system parts that are affected by a change request. Frequently (unexpected) changes lead to inconsistencies in the artifacts. In this paper, we extend an approach, originally aiming at exposing architectural knowledge at runtime, with informal requirement specifications and respective test cases. The presented approach thus enables the definition of runtime-traceable dependencies of requirement specifications and test cases to corresponding architectural elements and source code fragments. Thus, our approach aims to facilitate timely change propagation and regression testing