Enabling Automated Traceability Maintenance through the Upkeep of Traceability Relations

Traceability is demanded within mature development processes and offers a wide range of advantages. Nevertheless, there are deterrents to establishing traceability: it can be painstaking to achieve initially and then subject to almost instantaneous decay. To be effective, this is clearly an investment that should be retained. We therefore focus on reducing the manual effort incurred in performing traceability maintenance tasks. We propose an approach to recognize those changes to structural UML models that impact existing traceability relations and, based upon this knowledge, we provide a mix of automated and semi-automated strategies to update these relations. This paper provides technical details on the update process; it builds upon a previous publication that details how triggers for these updates can be recognized in an automated manner. The overall approach is supported by a prototype tool and empirical results on the effectiveness of tool-supported traceability maintenance are provided.