A Domain-Specific Language to manage Requirements Traceability
Saida Haidrar, Adil Anwar, Jean‐Michel Bruel, Ounsa Roudiès · Journal of Software · 2018
Tracing requirements back to stakeholders and initial documents on one hand, and forward to their corresponding designed system artifacts, on the other hand, are crucial activities.Requirements are often expressed independently from those artifacts and can take several forms: texts or models.This makes hard and tedious the inference of trace links between requirements and artifacts.This paper introduces ReqDL, a domain-specific language for describing requirements and, at the same time, capturing bidirectional traceability data, which concerns more precisely system modeling elements.The paper also introduces a generation algorithm based on ReqDL specifications in order to automatically generate independent trace models.Indeed, we present ReqDL concrete and abstract syntax in terms of grammar and metamodel.Using ReqDL expressions, we aim at assisting the traceability in formalizing easily understandable requirements and establishing an initial relationship between requirements and other system artifacts.The main result is the generation of requirements traces models which incorporate explicit and implicit trace links between requirements and design elements.Moreover, we provide a working example through which we demonstrate ReqDL practicality and usefulness.