From Software Traceability to Global Model Management and Back Again

In the past, traceability was concerned with tracing requirements also known as requirements traceability. Meanwhile, model-driven engineering (MDE) becomes popular and in this context, requirements traceability evolved to a more general software traceability, which is about tracing any relationship between software artifacts. Due to increasing heterogeneity and complexity of MDE, global model management (GMM) becomes indispensable to MDE. In state-of-the-art GMM approaches, traceability is primarily concerned with tracing model transformations, which generate traceability information as side-effect. However, this is only a subset of the capabilities of software traceability. My hypothesis is that GMM can benefit from software traceability by applying software traceability techniques into the context of GMM. Thus, I will consider GMM from a traceability perspective and show new possibilities to GMM that arise from taking in this perspective.