Visualization of Trace Links and Change Impact Analysis

Regulatory authorities of e.g. the automotive, avionic, or railway domain pose high requirements concerning safety assurance activities. One activity known from requirements engineering (RE) is requirements traceability. We propose a model-based methodology to facilitate trace link visualization over several levels of abstraction and different viewpoints. This intuitive visualization concept allows to see (i) the artifact importance using the degree and betweenness centrality measure, and (ii) the impact of an artifact change to other artifacts. Based on this, a novel impact analysis algorithm is proposed.