A Traceability Management Framework for Artefacts in Self-Adaptive Systems

We expect software systems to be dependable and sufficiently responsive to the inevitable changes regularly happen in their operational environments. This can be a challenging task to achieve when systems are in enterprise scale and large enough to cater for multiple complex business processes. One approach to address this is by incorporating suitable software process models and managing various artefacts within the process. However, once deployed, only maintenance of the software is viable through the process; it may not be sufficient for the needed changes due to the essential difficulties associated with software engineering. In order to overcome this challenge, self-adaptive systems with dynamically modifying architectures are becoming popular and sufficiently warrant for a mainstream practice in future. In light of these developments, we identified an important yet missing part in self-adaptive system engineering, i.e. artefact traceability management at runtime. This paper presents the research work on developing a generic traceability management toolkit with a traceability interlink visualizer aiding software engineers to explore artefact inconsistencies rapidly. The toolkit was then extended with a widely used self-adaptive system framework. The evaluation of the developed traceability management framework with a case system is presented.