Process automation with enumeration and traceability tools

Enumeration and traceability software tools have been developed and used in different industries, such as telecommunications and aerospace. Enumeration is a tagging process for linking individual entities to related entities in one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many relationships. The dependencies in a set of documents determine the overall parent-child relationships of entities in a set of documents. An entity might be a requirement, an architecture description, a physical/logical design, a module of source code, or a test case of any hardware/software system. Traceability is a tracking process for evolution interaction of the individual entities system´s life cycle. To automate traceability on any dependent entities, we need a database (relational or object-oriented) as a repository of the normalized data of all entities. A graphical representation of the entity dependencies will enhance the usability of the traceability tools. Some traceability tools supply their own methodologies (such as building document hierarchy, assigning attributes, building links etc.) and implementation models (such as integrating a traceability tool with word processing and data analysis tools, or joining a traceability tool with a messaging tool, i.e., e-mail for delivering timely information to the owners or authors of the impacted entities)