Software documents, their relationships and properties

One of the functionalities of software development environments is to maintain all the documents produced in the software development process. To facilitate the much needed traceability support for the software process, the representation of the software documents should capture not only the individual documents, but also their relationships and structural properties. We present an approach to the representation and description of software documents. Syntax trees, structural relations and structural constraints are introduced to capture the syntactic structures of documents, the inter- and intra-document relationships and the structural properties of these documents and relationships. With this three-tiered approach, we are able to obtain a complete, static representation and description of the documents´ syntactic and structural features