Using Developer-tool-Interactions to Expand Tracing Capabilities

Expanding current software traceability methodologies offers opportunities to significantly support development activities. State-of-the-art traceability frameworks use tracing data at specific points in time. This data includes information about development artefacts and their relations, which may be used for analysis, visualisation and similar purposes. In between those points in time, developers create, modify or delete requirements, diagrams, source code and other relevant artefacts. We propose to capture such artefact interactions in order to enrich the tracing data. By applying existing approaches in the field of developer-tool interaction analysis to the enriched data, we aim at supporting the developer’s work. In this paper, we present the overall approach, along with our development of a modular framework which may be used to capture the desired data from various tools, manage it and finally enable the execution of developer-interaction analyses.