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Definition of Horizontal Traceability

Nora Koch conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, performed the computation work, prepared figures and/or tables, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, and approved the final draft. María-José Escalona conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, performed the computation work, prepared figures and/or tables, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, and approved the final draft. One future task would be the implementation of a plug-in for an open source tool to allow further validation of the metamodel’s instantiation.

At first glance, this would appear to introduce a high degree of complexity, but that is not the case. Source and target metamodels define the relationship between concepts and need to be modelled only once. In the same way, model transformations are only defined once, unless the metamodel changes. The efficient management of traceability is another key factor to consider when combining data from different sources to generate more complete, improved and more accurate information. For information fusion to be successful, it is necessary to know the origin of the information in order to trace it in case of any change in the future. Trace management tools are therefore critical to guarantee the correct maintenance of fused information.

Traceability challenges

The proposed metamodel includes explicit change management, indicating the impact changes have on the models. Context models are therefore monitored to detect changes in their traceable elements. Each modification of an element in a source context model is analyzed and may result in the automatic modification of the target context models and, if possible, of the corresponding trace links.

Milestones representing key decisions or deliverables should have each predecessor activity traced and validated to make certain that they are directly related to accomplishing the milestone. Source and Target represent the directions in which transformations are executed to create the links. Vertical and horizontal links are both supported, depending on whether Source and Target belong to different versions of the same model or to different models. TraceableElement describes any artifact in a context model and is identified by its attribute name. In the example of the patient (Fig. 1), for instance, a TraceableElement might be the storage requirement (SR-01), the class (CL-01) or the database table (TL-01), but also their attributes. This image presents an example to illustrate the traceability of a storage requirement in the analysis and design phase.

What is vertical and horizental Traceability?

A relationship between two elements in the figure means that there is dependency between those two elements. For instance, the relationship marked with a number 5 means that the use cases are directly related to functional tests, and that a TraceLink (see Fig. 4) should https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ exist between them. The trace model is modelled as a composite of trace links relating elements of a source context model (for example, a requirement use case model) with the elements of a target context model (for example, a class model in the design phase).

The development team was made up of about 15 people (this number varied during the project) and each result had to be validated with the general project team. Any change during product definition or validation was therefore critical and a great effort was needed to manage the specific aspects affected by each change in the overall system. The traceability matrix provided great support for easily finding connections between artifacts and for evaluating their impact on the rest of the project.

The emergence of requirements networks: the case for requirements inter-dependencies

The authors also plan to evaluate the approach using the benchmark proposed by Charrada et al. (2011) and to measure software quality improvements in current projects. A systematic, rigorous evaluation of the automated approach presented and implemented in this work might be based on the metrics proposed by Cleland-Huang (2006). Horizontal traceability demonstrates that the overall schedule is rational, has been planned in a logical sequence, accounts for the interdependence of detailed activities and planning packages, and provides a way to evaluate current status. Schedules that are horizontally traceable depict logical relationships between different program elements and product handoffs. Horizontally traceable schedules support the calculation of activity and milestone dates and the identification of critical and near-critical paths.

The related elements in the context model are the so-called “traceable” elements in the metamodel. These concepts are represented in the metamodel by the classes TraceableElement and TraceLink. The key aspects in traceability management are identification of products from the specific contexts to be traced and the creation and monitoring of the traces detected. 3 as context, tracing, and monitoring models, represented horizontal traceability in turn by the UML classes ContextModel, TraceModel and MonitoringModel. The personal information requirement therefore changes, but so does the class at the analysis level, the table in the design level database and the code in the Java class, as can be seen in Fig. If requirements are not traced, a simple change like this may imply the difficult task of analyzing which artifacts of the system are involved.

Product

A systematic evaluation is not included in this paper as it is still work in progress. A more recent literature review was carried out by Tufail et al. (2017). This review focused on requirements traceability techniques, models, and tools, offering detailed analysis and comparison and providing a set of comparative tables. It distinguished, among other things, between traceability metamodels, traceability process models and traceability information models. The work included a general list of 10 traceability challenges, and a more detailed analysis of traceability tools. Horizontal traceability is an aspect identifying non hierarchical similarities, mutual properties, interactions, etc. among requirements and work products.

As NDT is being used in several companies, we are confident of their experience and collaboration. Model-Driven Engineering techniques are mainly used for the automatic generation of code in the software development process (Hutchinson et al., 2011). MDE also plays an important role in other software engineering areas such as software testing, supporting the generation of test cases. The aim in the present study was to demonstrate the potential of MDE in terms of traceability, since it allows traces to be recorded as a by-product of model transformations.

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Another future work is to decouple the rules from the tool code in such a way that the TraceRules can be defined and interpreted by NDT “on the fly”, without the need to modify the code. This image presents an example to illustrate how the monitoring model helps in changing management. Firstly, clicking on an element traces all elements related to that element. 11 shows the trace elements when the “Creation Anamnesis” activity is selected. This figure presents an example of a function requirement in the iMedea project. Rempel & Mäder (2016) also focus on traceability difficulties, providing an assessment model and a comprehensive classification of possible traceability problems and assessment criteria for systematically detecting those problems.

• The process presented in the previous section will be applied to integrate our approach in the NDT tool suite.
• This screen presents who the tool presents the traceability matrix that is automatically generated with our approach.
• The image presents a sequence model to illustrate the process of use of the monitoring model.
• Traceability management comprises the creation and maintenance of tracing models.
• If it is OK, the TestUIStep “Creation Anamnesis” is created, together with a TraceLink object that stores this relationship (denominated StepTL in Fig. 7).
• During analysis, such a requirement will be modelled as a class in which to store the patient’s information (identified in Fig. 1 as CL-01).

Vertical traceability demonstrates the consistency of dates, status, and scope requirements between different levels of a schedule—summary, intermediate, and detailed. When schedules are vertically traceable, lower-level schedules are clearly consistent with upper-level schedule milestones, allowing for total schedule integrity and enabling different teams to work to the same schedule expectations. An activity owner should be able to trace activities to higher-level milestones within intermediate and summary schedules. Ideally, the same schedule serves as the summary, intermediate, and detailed schedule by simply creating a summary view filtered on summary activities orhigher-level WBS milestones.

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You can easily use this matrix to update relationships in your project, identify orphaned requirements, and ensure Test Coverage. This video shows you how to create an Intersection RTM using the work items from your project. Once TraceLink(s) have been created, the Quality plug-in checks consistency whenever a change is made—for instance, if a new activity like “Fill in personal patient data” is added to the activity diagram in Fig.