A Generic Traceability Metamodel for Enabling Unified End-to-End Traceability in Software Product Lines

Mature development methodologies like software product line engineering or model-driven engineering are more and more adopted in software development. Accordingly, the resulting development processes combine artifacts from different disciplines and on different abstraction levels. It is crucial that the relationship between these artifacts is explicitly maintained to be able to track the development process and the reasons for design decisions. This problem becomes exacerbated if variability is considered since it is a cross-cutting concern that impacts all disciplines and artifacts. Traceability links support the linking of artifacts across model boundaries in an end-to-end manner. However, existing traceability solutions are either limited to specific development processes, tools, and artifact types, lack in uniformity, or do not consider variability. Thus, this paper introduces a MOF-based generic traceability metamodel for establishing uniform traceability-enabled workflows in a variability-aware and model-based environment. Necessary steps for instantiating the metamodel to specific artifact types of certain development processes are described. We evaluate the proposed solution with an exemplar of a car headlight and demonstrate the benefits of a consistent traceability concept.