Deriving traceability relationships of multiperspective software artifacts from ontology matching

Abstract

Requirements traceability and change management in multiperspective software artifacts is a major challenge due to the heterogeneity of the artifacts themselves. Our previous attempt in resolving such problem results in a multiperspective requirements traceability framework, namely MUPRET. The key idea of MUPRET is to use ontology, so-called requirements ontology, as a common representation of mutual understanding of semantics of words in the requirements sentences. By doing so, the traceability relationships can be automatically generated when a match is found in the requirements ontologies. Although the MUPRET was originally proposed for the textual requirements, this paper presents the extension of MUPRET to cover different representations of software artifacts, together with an illustrative example of the extended applications. © 2009 IEEE.