Enabling Automated Traceability Maintenance by Recognizing Development Activities Applied to Models

For anything but the simplest of software systems, the ease and costs associated with change management can become critical to the success of a project. Establishing traceability initially can demand questionable effort, but sustaining this traceability as changes occur can be a neglected matter altogether. Without conscious effort, traceability relations become increasingly inaccurate and irrelevant as the artifacts they associate evolve. Based upon the observation that there are finite types of development activity that appear to impact traceability when software development proceeds through the construction and refinement of UML models, we have developed an approach to automate traceability maintenance in such contexts. Within this paper, we describe the technical details behind the recognition of these development activities, a task upon which our automated approach depends, and we discuss how we have validated this aspect of the work to date.