Architecture-Centric Traceability for Stakeholders: Technical Foundations

Software traceability, is recognized for its utility in many development activities. Achieving traceability in practice, however, is difficult because of the complex interaction between factors like high costs, heterogeneous artifacts and tools, and varied stakeholder interests. Architecture-Centric Traceability for Stakeholders (ACTS) is a technical framework that considers the economic and social challenges to traceability. This framework connects distributed and varied artifacts around concepts represented by the architecture, enables stakeholders to control the traceability capture via tool extensibility and customization, and prospectively captures links in the background as users perform their development tasks. We discuss open hypermedia and rules as the supporting mechanisms of our framework. We demonstrate the technical feasibility of our approach through a case study in software acquisition research and an exemplar implementation. We also discuss means of increasing the practicability of our framework based on user feedback.