Supporting event based traceability through high-level recognition of change events

Although requirements traceability is crucial in both the development and maintenance of a software system, traceability links and related artifacts tend to deteriorate, as time-pressured practitioners fail to systematically update them in response to change. Event-based traceability addresses this issue by establishing links through a loosely coupled publisher/subscriber scheme. Dependent entities subscribe to requirements and receive event notifications as changes occur. This paper focuses upon the role played by the requirements specification as a publisher of events. A set of standard change events is defined and a method for monitoring a user´s actions within a requirements management environment and the subsequent recognition and publication of the change events is proposed. Early results obtained from testing this approach are reported.