Understanding Architectural Elements from Requirements Traceability Networks

The benefits of requirements traceability to understand architectural representations are still hard to achieve. This is because architectural knowledge usually remains implicit in the heads of the architects, except the architecture design itself. The aim of this research is to make architectural knowledge more explicit by mining homogenous and heterogeneous requirements traceability networks. This chapter investigates such networks achieved by event-based traceability and call graphs. Both traces are harvested during a software project. An evaluation study suggests the potential of this approach. Traceability networks can be used in understanding some of the resulting architectural styles based on the real time state of a software project. We also demonstrate the use of traceability networks to monitor initial system decisions and identify bottlenecks in a software project.