A state-based approach to traceability maintenance

Traceability of software artefacts has been recognized as an important factor for supporting various software development activities. However, establishing traceability requires a substantial investment in effort. Even when an initial set of traceability links has been established, this set is subject to gradual degradation as the associated artefacts are modified, e.g., due to the evolutionary nature of software development. To avoid this, traceability must be constantly maintained and evolved. The manual maintenance of traceability can be time consuming and error-prone. This paper focuses on reducing the manual effort incurred in performing traceability maintenance tasks. This is achieved by introducing a dedicated mechanism in the Traceability Metamodelling Language, which is used for detecting and evolving problematic trace links. A concrete example is used to demonstrate the practicality and usefulness of our approach.