Authors: Ewab Tempero, James Noble, Robert Biddle, Elvis Software Design Research Group ~
Source: GZipped PostScript (168kb); Adobe PDF
(424kb)
Traceability is the ability to determine relationships between different development artifacts in the software development process. Being able to automatically trace from the requirements through to the implementation allows questions such as Are all the requirements met by the implementation to be reliably answered. While answers to such questions are important for managing the quality of both the process and the product, gathering and managing the relationships that allows such automatic checking can be expensive, making it less clear that the benefit justifies the cost. The creative nature of design means that the relationships between requirements and design cannot be derived automatically, and so their management cost is high. We use a design technique that, with appropriate tool support, can significantly reduce that cost. It represents the requirements using a particular kind of use case, and develops an object-oriented design. We present Ukase, a web-based tool that provides such support. Keywords: web-based tool support, traceability, use cases, object-oriented design