Ontological Traceability for Software

Abstract

In the development process of a software product, the stakeholders and developers are often buried in a plethora of software artifacts. Examples of these software artifacts include: Requirements, architecture, code, test cases, documentation, and many more. The relations between these artifacts can provide important information for the software project, but unfortunately, these software artifacts are disconnected by nature.\\

The research field on software traceability aims to automate the creation of trace links between software artifacts, as the manual creation of these trace links is considered to be too much work by practitioners. The research community of software traceability has set the ambitious goal of ubiquitous traceability, meaning that traceability is always there, without having to think about getting it there.\\

This research project aims to provide a first step towards a ubiquitous solution to software traceability, by combining it with techniques from the field of ontology, and the field of natural language processing. The theory for Ontological Traceability for Software is established, after which a proof-of-concept for the theory is designed, implemented, and evaluated. We conclude that the method proposed in the theory has the potential to ultimately provide ubiquitous traceability, but many more research and technological advances in the fields of natural language processing and ontology are necessary to achieve this goal.