Towards traceability modeling for the engineering of heterogeneous systems

Capturing traceability information among artifacts allows for assuring product quality in many ways such as tracking functional and non-functional requirements, performing system validation and impact analysis. Although literature provides many techniques to model traceability, existing solutions are either tailored to specific domains (e.g., Ecore modeling languages), or not complete enough (e.g., lack support to specify traceability link semantics). This paper examines the current traceability models and identifies the drawbacks that prevent from capturing some traceability information of heterogeneous artifacts. In this context, heterogeneous artifacts refer to artifacts that come from widely different modelling notations (e.g., UML, Simulink, natural language text, source code). Additionally, the paper proposes traceability model requirements that are necessary to build a generic traceability model. We argue that the proposed requirements are sufficient to build a traceability model oblivious of the heterogeneity of the models which elements need to be traced. We also argue that our proposed requirements can be adopted to create a generic traceability model that provides flexibility and can accommodate new ways of characterizing and imposing constraints on trace links or systems artifacts. The proposed requirements incorporate the ideas from many existing solutions in literature, in an attempt to be as complete as possible.