TracQL: A Domain-Specific Language for Traceability Analysis

Traceability analysis is used to improve quality in the software development process. As such an analysis is complex to implement and often requires a lot of dense code that is specific to the system being traced, there is a need for a framework to express traceability analysis tasks. This paper presents the Traceability Query Language TracQL, an expressive, extensible, representation-independent, and fast domain-specific language. Known approaches do not fulfill all these requirements. We examine TracQL and compare it to other approaches on a software ageing problem, namely to detect divergence between architecture and code. The necessary TracQL code is much shorter (by a factor of 1.7) and about twice as fast as what known approaches can achieve.