Tool support for traceability between requirements and design

CS-TR-02-7

Authors: Robert Biddle, James Noble, Ewan Tempero, Elvis Software Design Research Group ~
Source: GZipped PostScript (196kb); Adobe PDF (467kb)


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 have developed a design technique that, with appropriate tool support, can significantly reduce that cost. We present Ukase, a web-based tool that provides such support.

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