Implementing Traceability Repositories as Graph Databases for Software Quality Improvement

Traceability identifies dependencies between software artifacts facilitating the impact analysis of modifications to requirements, design and code. There is limited application of traceability in industry due to the complexity of traceability models and lack of tools. In this paper, we present simplified rules to define trace link types. To store and represent trace links, we implement a traceability repository as a native graph database. This is in contrast to other approaches that use structured files for storage or traceability matrices for representation. In addition, we present a methodology to apply our proposed rules to create trace links using three datasets. We demonstrate the advantage of the graph traceability repository over current representation and storage methods in visualizing traceability links, facilitating the derivation of new trace links and in query response times.