On the Role of Traceability for Standards Compliance: Tracking Requirements to Code

Abstract

Traceability is the common term for mechanisms to record and navigate relationships between development and assessment artifacts. While often seen as a way of reducing systematic development errors and despite being a requirement of industry standards, lack of tool integration can make it difficult to achieve traceability in practice. This paper proposes a framework enabling traceability links to be established across tool ’boundaries’. The framework is realised by exporting data from CASE tools – concentrating here on examples used to express requirements and program code – to meta-models represented in a common format; traceability links (represented in the same format) can then be established between elements of these models. In turn, safety cases – structured using an appropriate graphical technique and with computer-based support – can make direct appeal to sets of these links as evidence of meeting traceability goals.