Leveraging Traceability between Code and Tasks for Code Review and Release Management

The software maintenance process relies on traceability information captured throughout the development of a software product. Traceability from code to software engineering artifacts like features or requirements has been extensively researched. In this paper, we focus on traceability links between code and tasks. Tasks can be further linked to other artifacts such as features or requirements. In this paper, we present an approach for (semi-) automatic creation of traceability links between code and tasks. The core idea is to let the developers create the links themselves while they use a version control system. We use these traceability links to improve the processes of code review and release management. A prototype based on this work has been implemented and integrated into the model-based CASE tool UNICASE. We applied the developed prototype in the open-source project UNICASE itself and report about our significant experiences. Keywords-traceability; code review; release management; patch; branch.