Traceability relations support stakeholders in understanding the dependencies between artifacts created during the development of a software system and thus enable many development-related tasks. To ensure that the anticipated benefits of these tasks can be realized, it is necessary to have an up-to-date set of traceability relations between the established artifacts. This goal requires the creation of traceability relations during the initial development process. Furthermore, the goal also requires the maintenance of traceability relations over time as the software system evolves in order to prevent their decay. In this paper, an approach is discussed that supports the (semi-) automated update of traceability relations between requirements, analysis and design models of software systems expressed in the UML. This is made possible by analyzing change events that have been captured while working within a third-party UML modeling tool. Within the captured flow of events, development activities comprised of several events are recognized. These are matched with predefined rules that direct the update of impacted traceability relations. The overall approach is supported by a prototype tool and empirical results on the effectiveness of tool-supported traceability maintenance are provided.

中文翻译：

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迈向自动化可追溯性维护

可追溯性关系支持利益相关者理解在软件系统开发过程中创建的工件之间的依赖关系，从而实现许多与开发相关的任务。为了确保能够实现这些任务的预期收益，必须在已建立的工件之间拥有一组最新的可追溯性关系。这个目标要求在初始开发过程中创建可追溯性关系。此外，随着软件系统的发展，该目标还需要随着时间的推移维护可追溯性关系，以防止其衰败。在本文中，讨论了一种支持（半）自动更新以 UML 表示的软件系统的需求、分析和设计模型之间的可追溯性关系的方法。这是通过分析在第三方 UML 建模工具中工作时捕获的更改事件而实现的。在捕获的事件流中，识别出由多个事件组成的开发活动。这些与指导受影响的可追溯性关系更新的预定义规则相匹配。整体方法由原型工具支持，并提供了有关工具支持的可追溯性维护有效性的实证结果。