The Need for a Unifying Traceability Scheme

The benefits of traceability are widely accepted nowadays, however, several issues still make it difficult a wide-scale adoption of traceability in the software engineering practice. There is a lack of a commonly accepted traceability definition further than the term definition, a standard way of specifying traceability among items, and a traceability type classification; besides, conflicts among a number of approaches exist. As a result traceability-schemes implementation in tools lacks of generality and exchangeability. Round trip engineering therefore cannot be well enough supported. The motivation behind is aligned with that of PIM within the MDA initiative. This paper analyzes several current traceability schemes, in order to obtain relevant features and identify overlaps and inconsistencies among the approaches. Then, and based on the analysis, it provides an initial approach for a Traceability Specification Scheme. This scheme is expected to facilitate traceability specification for a given project, to improve the traceability management, and help to automate some traces management processes.

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