(Not) Yet Another Metamodel For Traceability

Traceability helps explaining the execution and evolution of software and systems. It is a key input in many engineering tasks such as program understanding, maintenance and debugging. Several metamodels to facilitate the representation of traces and links among related artefacts have been proposed. There exists a plethora of traceability approaches that focus on distinct segments of the software and systems development. Nevertheless, we claim they lack the mechanisms to express important traceability aspects such as the quality of traces, their gradual decay, and the evidences supporting them. This affects the benefits traceability can bring to the above-mentioned tasks. This paper presents a more expressive traceability metamodel, covering all the missing dimensions in a single, but extensible and modular, design. It characterizes trace quality to consider traces as salient artifacts in system and software development and maintenance. This modularity facilitates the integration of our solution in other modeling languages or its partial adoption when only some specific traceability aspects are needed. Its extensibility facilitates its customization (e.g., in terms of the types of links and artefacts) to better cover specific domains.