Improving system development using traceability

During the development of complex systems many different artifacts such as requirements specifications, architecture specifications, software units, test specifications or test cases need to be created and maintained. Due to the complexity of the systems it is no longer possible for single engineers to keep an overview over all these artifacts on all levels of detail. Typical questions are: • Is it still possible to accept a late change request? What would be the impact? • What is the overall level of completion of the system or a component? • Which components are ready for testing? • A failure occurs because the system is erroneous. What parts of the system should I check? In order to be able to answer these questions it is important do be able to follow the life of each requirement in both directions, i.e. from specification, via architecture to code and test and vice versa. Bi-directional traceability is identified as a good practice for improving the quality within system and software development and is thus required by process standards such as SPICE, CMMI and ISO 26262. This talk provides methodological guidelines for adding traceability to existing tool chains and proposes an implementation based on open source frameworks.

Mark Brörkens is Software Architect, Project Manager and Product Manager at itemis AG. He has several years of experience in developing software in the automotive domain and was actively involved in standardization organizations such as AUTOSAR and HIS. His main focus is on domain specific languages and technologies, especially in the area of requirements managements and traceability. Ömer Gürsoy is Senior IT Consultant at itemis AG. He was operative as analyst, developer, architect, trainer and project leader in the domains enterprise systems, embedded systems and tool development. His special interests are system architectures and model driven software development.