A Proposal for Defining a Set of Basic Items for Project-Specific Traceability Methodologies

One widely accepted approach to implement traceability practices is the use of methodologies. But the information related to organization, stakeholders, product size, and quality requirements may change from one project to another. As a consequence, traceability information differs as well, which arises specific traceability requirements to each project.One common way to cope with this fact is the use of metamodels to underpin methodologies. However most of the traceability metamodeling approaches simply provide a predefined set of concepts, with no extension mechanism.Therefore, customizing a methodology for a specific project is often unsatisfactory. This paper justifies that this problem can be approached if traceability metamodels include a basic set of items, including concepts and traceability structures, designed to be extended according to project features. For this, the right modeling tools are required:that is, some metamodeling principles that support typing and extensibility, together with a general and extensible description of the software process. This second issue is obtained from ISO/IEC 24744 with some additional inputs.This paper explains how to use these tools in practice to define the so called TmM metamodel. Within this paper TmMis applied to a case study in which non-conventional work products have to be considered as part of the trace ability information.