Traceability Management through Use Cases when Developing Distributed Object Applications

Abstract. The software life cycle of Distributed Object applications encompasses many activities, which go from requirements specification and leads to design and implementation taking into account aspects related to architectural issues. In such a life cycle, activities related to communication and integration mechanisms defined in Distributed Objects Technologies have to be executed. On the other hand, the support for software traceability has been established as an important task in the development life cycle of software systems. As the design is refined to a concrete implementation, it is important that concepts in analysis and design have a clear correspondence to implementation artifacts. This article describes activities and artifacts associated with Analysis, Design, Implementation and Deployment models when developing Distributed Object applications. In this sense, this work proposes a clear traceability from the Use Case model through Analysis, Design, Implementation and Deployment models. An example of the traceability is presented by means of a case study involving web access to Bank accounts. Keywords: use cases, distributed objects, traceability, and UML notation. 1