Towards a Unified Process for Automated Traceability

Acknowledgements: I would like to extend my utmost gratitude to Dr Jane Cleland-Huang for her help and invaluable input in this thesis. Her passion for knowledge, her hard work and her constant dedication have been an inspiration for me. I also gratefully acknowledge the feedback and input that I received from the thesis committee: Dr Orlena Gotel, Dr Xiaoping Jia, and Harold Streeter. Additionally I would like to extend a thank you to Brian Berenbach of Siemens Corporate Research for his early feedback and to Stephen Clark for his contribution of the trace strategy diagram shown in Appendix 2: Trace Strategy and Granularity. Abstract Automated Traceability presents a new way of implementing traceability that can potentially save time and effort over the traditional approaches that require links to be set up and maintained manually. However, in order to maximize the results of this technique, automated traceability has to be implemented within the context of a software engineering process. In this thesis we will present a generic process meta-model that will guide organizations in incorporating automated traceability into their own software engineering processes. We will also provide an example of an instantiation of this meta-model for a particular process and tool. This example, besides illustrating the instantiation of the meta-model, will present a paradigm and technique used to build processes and it will also serve as an open source content starting point.