Automatic Tracing of Decisions to Architecture and Implementation

Traceability requires capturing the relations between software artifacts like requirements, architecture and implementation explicitly. Manual discovery and recovery of tracing information by studying documents, architecture documentation and implementation is time-intensive, costly, and may miss important information not found in the analyzed artifacts. Approaches for explicitly capturing traces exist, but either require manual capturing or lack comprehensive tracing to both architecture and implementation. In this paper we present an approach for (semi)automatically capturing traceability relationships from requirements and design decisions to architecture and implementation. Traces are captured in a non-intrusive way during architecture design and implementation. The captured traces are integrated with a semi-formally defined architecture description model and serve as the basis for different kinds of architecture-related activities.