Assessing the impact of change on a software development project is a critical management activity. Traceability affords us opportunities to manage the change process through notification and synchronisation mechanisms. We present an architecture, developed as part of the EU funded Ophelia project, that supports traceability across all project artefacts.

In development processes multiple tools are used to describe different aspects of the developed product. The resulting information is stored in heterogeneous documents that are technically independent but whose contents are closely related on the semantic level. Thus, if one document is changed, these changes have to be propagated to dependent documents in order to restore mutual consistency. Therefore, there is a need for incremental integration tools which assist developers in consistency maintenance. Driven by this need, we realized a framework for building incremental integration tools which is currently being used in the chemical engineering domain. Integration tools are based on models of the related documents and their mutual relationships. These models are defined in the Unified Modeling Language (UML).

Assessing the impact of change on a software development project is a critical management activity. Traceability affords us opportunities to manage the change process through notification and synchronisation mechanisms. We present an architecture, developed as part of the EU funded Ophelia project, that supports traceability across all project artefacts.

This article describes a proposed P2P-based environment called SESAME to manage semantically enhanced artefacts from the software engineering domain. We argue that such artefacts, for instance code, models and documents, are not currently semantically enhanced (a state we call premantic) and that there are few tools that could manage and use such metadata to derive some added value for searching, sharing and organisation. Yet, semantic-based services can aid resource discovery and provide advanced information management. These services depend on the quality of metadata extracted, however, to manually provide this metadata is an expensive process. Current tools that automatically acquire, process and relate semantics to content are limited. Therefore, the SESAME project will develop an open architecture and toolset to manage the elicitation and configuration of artefact semantics; specifically in the domain of software engineering.

Abstract — Consistency checking needs to be done from the earliest phase of requirements capture as requirements captured by requirement engineers are often vague, errorprone and inconsistent with users ’ needs. To improve such consistency checking we have applied a traceability approach with visualization capability. We have embedded this into a light-weight automated tracing tool in order to allow users to capture their requirements and generate Essential Use Case models of these requirements automatically. Our tool supports interactions that derive from the text and Essential Use Case models. A preliminary evaluation has been conducted with target end users and the tool usefulness and ease of use are evaluated. We describe our motivation for this research, our prototype tool and results of our evaluation.

Software architectures play a key role for the development and evolution of software systems because they have to enable their quality properties such as scalability, flexibility, and security. Software architectural decisions represent a transition from problem space with quality goals and requirements on one side to solution space with technical solutions on the other side. Technical solutions are reusable elements for the work of the architect as for example patterns, styles, frameworks and building blocks. For long-term evolution of the systems, an explicit mapping between goals and solutions is helpful for expressing design knowledge and fundamental decisions. Such a mapping has to bridge between the fields of requirements engineering, software architectural design, and software quality thus enabling reuse. In this paper the Goal Solution Scheme is discussed, which maps quality goals and goal refinements to architectural principles and solutions. The paper extends the approach from the previously discussed forward engineering to re-engineering activities thus covering evolutionary development processes. The evaluation of the approach has been performed in several case studies and projects including a large industrial one.

Abstract: Quality properties, so-called non-functional ones, have a fundamental influence on the development of software systems because they constitute the decisive factors for the design of a system's software architecture. They earn a similar consideration like functional properties. For a high evolvability of the software systems, traceability supports changes by facilitating design decisions, software comprehension and coverage checks. In this paper a method for design traceability is presented, in which links both for functional and quality properties are established in similar ways. A software category based design method is used for a better alignment between requirements and design. As a consequence, the method leads to a reduced number of traceability links. The method has been successfully applied in the development and partial reengineering of an e-commerce system. 1