A Domain-Specific Language for Traceability in Modeling

Abstract

Requirements are a key aspect of software development. Requirements are also related with other software artefacts including designs, test cases and documentation. These artefacts are often captured with specialized models. However, many tools lack support for traceability relationships between requirements artefacts and model artefacts, leading to analysis issues. To establish traceability between models and other types of requirements artefacts, this thesis proposes a new Domain-Specific Language (DSL) for describing the concepts of a modeling language that would be intended to be traced using a Requirements Management System (RMS), with tool support handling the evolution of models and of their traceability links. In the first part of this thesis, the syntax and metamodel of the Model Traceability DSL (MT-DSL) are defined, together with an editor implemented using Xtext. In the second part of the thesis, a library of import and maintenance functions is generated automatically (using Xtend) from model traceability descriptions written using MT-DSL. The target language for this library is the DOORS eXtension Language (DXL), the scripting language of a leading commercial RMS with traceability support, namely IBM Rational DOORS. The implementation has been tested successfully for importing and evolution scenarios with two different modeling languages (User Requirements Notation and Finite State Machines). This work hence contributes a reliable mechanism to define and support traceability between requirements and models.