Overview

Background

The management of evolutionary changes in complex software systems demands for an explicit management and representation of dependency relations. Explicit dependency relations provide direct support for various activities, including program comprehension, impact analysis, test coverage analysis, effort estimation, and evaluating architectural quality properties. While the concept of dependency relations is of an rather abstract nature, traceability links are one possible means to express dependencies. However, the representation of relations between different models through traceability links requires for a joint repository where the different models are stored. EMFTrace is built upon the EMFStore repository, which is used as a storage for all models and traceability links. EMFTrace extends the underlying repository by integrating several import interfaces for different CASE tools and automated traceability detection techniques.

Scope

The objectives of the EMFTrace project are the following:

• import and store artifacts produced by different CASE tools for comprehensive analysis
• store dependency relations between corresponding elements of different artifacts as traceability links
• discover relations between different artifacts – automatic and partly interactive
• maintain and re-discover the relations after changes and thus support the synchronization of artifacts after changes of related artifacts
• provide access to the inter-model relations for inspection, visualization and comprehension
• maintain a meta-model for relations and traceability detection rules
• enable the evaluation of relations regarding completeness, consistency and certainty

The interplay of EMFTrace and other CASE tools

The following illustrates the interplay of EMFTrace with other 3rd party tools.