A Domain-specific Language for Configurable Traceability Analysis

In safety-critical industries such as the aviation industry or the medical industry traceability is required by law and specific regulations. In addition, process models such as CMMI require traceability information for documentation purposes. Although creating and maintaing so-called traceability information models (TIM) takes a lot of effort, its potential for reporting development progress, supporting project management, and measuring software quality often remains untapped. The domain-specific language presented in this paper builds on an existing traceability solution and allows to define queries, metrics, and rules for company-or project-specific usage. The basis for such an analysis is a query expression to retrieve information from a TIM. Customizable metrics are then defined to compute aggregated values, which are evaluated against companyor project-specific thresholds using the rules part of the domain-specific language. The focus of this paper is to show how the combination of query, metric, and rule expressions is used to define and compute customizable analyses based on individual requirements.