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Traceability in Model-Driven Engineering: Efficient and Scalable Traceability Maintenance

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Software and Systems Traceability

Abstract

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) employs models and model transformations as first-class citizens throughout the whole software development life cycle. Support for automated traceability is necessary because models in MDE usually have inherent dependencies between each other, which must be visible. Furthermore, software evolves which implies to also maintain traceability. In this chapter, we present an efficient and scalable traceability maintenance approach. It uses formal rules to specify conditions for maintaining traceability links. We also show the constitution of our rules and how we improved them, in comparison to a previous approach. Based on this formalism, we present two maintenance strategies. We show an initial (batch) strategy that is applied in case that no change information is available. The second strategy is incremental and therefore scalable. The incremental strategy is applied when change information is available. We explain our approach and evaluate the efficiency and scalability of our approach by means of the mobile phone product line case study presented in this book.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Our approach is technically not restricted to formal software artifacts, but it develops its full potential in that domain. We evaluate our approach in a slightly different domain than proposed because the software artifacts of the applied case study are primarily semi-formal.

  2. 2.

    A Story Diagram is a combination of UML activity diagrams and graph-rewriting rules (Fischer et al., 2000).

  3. 3.

    We can only trace this dependency if the descriptions are completely similar.

  4. 4.

    http://www.eclipse.org/

  5. 5.

    Ecore is the metametamodel of Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/emf/

  6. 6.

    Graphical Modeling Framework; http://www.eclipse.org/gmf/

  7. 7.

    The performance evaluation is conducted on a Apple MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz, 4 GB main memory, Mac OS X 10.6.5, Java 1.6.0, and Eclipse 3.5.2 with EMF 2.5.0.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hasso-Plattner-Institute, The University of Potsdam, 14482, Potsdam, Germany

    Andreas Seibel

  2. Hasso-Plattner-Institute at the University of Potsdam, Potsdam, 14482, Germany

    Regina Hebig & Holger Giese

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  1. Andreas Seibel
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  2. Regina Hebig
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  3. Holger Giese
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Correspondence to Andreas Seibel .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. , School of Computing, DePaul University, 1 East Jackson Boulevard, Chicago, 60604, USA

    Jane Cleland-Huang

  2. 720 Greenwich Street, New York, 10014, USA

    Orlena Gotel

  3. , School of Informatics, City University, London, EC1V 0HB, United Kingdom

    Andrea Zisman

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Seibel, A., Hebig, R., Giese, H. (2012). Traceability in Model-Driven Engineering: Efficient and Scalable Traceability Maintenance. In: Cleland-Huang, J., Gotel, O., Zisman, A. (eds) Software and Systems Traceability. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2239-5_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2239-5_10

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  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4471-2238-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-2239-5

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