Enhanced Traceability for the Unified Process

Complex, business critical software systems have to adapt to frequently changing needs. Evolutionary development processes have been developed to enable short responses to changes. In complex settings the changes bear high risks, such as incomplete implementation, misunderstood dependencies, missing comprehension and lacking coverage. To manage these risks, the concept of traceability has been developed and introduced to most development process standards. However, we have to state that traceability is poorly used in practice, mostly limited to tracing requirements. Nevertheless, traceability links are needed to connect design and implementation elements as well. To be useful, traceability links have to be defined at a fine-grained level and maintained in a correct and complete state. Since a high number of links has to be managed, and the maintenance tasks have to be carried out manually, an extremely high effort is required. Tool support would be very helpful, but it is only possible if the development methods support the traceability links. Most design methods claim to support the concept of traceability, although their definitions of artefacts, relations and activities are too imprecise to define rules for traceability links based on them. It is necessary to refine the definition of development methods to a level that enables the establishment of traceability links during the developer’s activities. A development activity conserved in this way, has to store additionally the reasons and decisions for that activity. Furthermore, it is necessary to perform this definition for concrete development methods, which are widely used in the industrial practice. For our work we have chosen the Unified Process UP to define a process-specific model of traceability links. Although, Letelier showed in [4] the application of his metamodel for the UP, his definitions are not detailed enough to derive rules for traceability links. The UP description by its authors offers traceability as one of its features, but it is lacking a detailed description of how and between which artefacts the traceability links should be established. Additionally, works are necessary to give a unique syntactical and semantical definition of traceability links. The contribution of our work consists in analysis and classification of all UP artefacts regarding traceability aspects.