Provenance in Software Engineering - A Configuration Management View

Information provenance is a mechanism for tracing and verifying sources of information. In software development, provenance can be seen in two dimensions: (a) traceability among different versions of the same artifact and (b) traceability among various artifacts across system lifecycle. Maintaining the provenance, including the history of changes and the rationale of changes, are critical in assessing change requests, identifying of appropriate products/builds, and ensuring configuration integrity. Although some Configuration Management (CM) tools support a form of provenance by keeping logs of changes, such logs are proprietary and cannot be migrated to other systems if needed. In this research, we demonstrate how provenance can be achieved in configuration management by binding an artifact to its traceability and evolution information and storing such information in XML-based metadata, so that the information can be moved along with the artifact from one CM tool to another.