Interactive Traceability Links Visualization using Hierarchical Trace Map

Abstract

Traceability links between various software artifacts of a system aid software engineers in system comprehension, verification and change impact analysis. Establishing trace links between software artifacts manually is an error-prone and costly task. Recently, studies in automated traceability link recovery area have received broad attention in the software maintenance community aiming to overcome the challenges of manual trace links maintenance process. In these studies, the trace links results generated by an automated trace recovery approach are presented either in a bland textual matrix format (e.g., tabular format) or two-dimensional graphical formats (e.g. tree view, hierarchical leaf node). Therefore, it is challenging for software engineers to explore the inter-relationships between various artifacts at once (e.g., which test cases and source code files/methods are related to a particular requirement). In this position paper, we propose a hierarchical trace map visualization technique to explore inter-relationships between various artifacts at once naturally and intuitively.