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In
today’s software engineering environment, software systems
must be flexible and extensible in order to adapt to the changes
around them. Change
is partially managed through impact analysis and supported by a
traceability infrastructure that tracks the relationships that
exist between requirements and other software engineering
entities.
Unfortunately,
practice has shown that traceability links tend to erode, as
time-pressured practitioners find it difficult to maintain them
under changing conditions.
The traceability scheme quickly deteriorates into a
historical snapshot of the system that is no longer able to
reliably support change management.
Event-based
traceability offers a solution to the long-term erosion
experienced in traditional schemes by supporting traceability
through a loosely coupled subscriber-publisher scheme that is
ideally suited to handle change.
Traceable objects are no longer tightly coupled but are
linked through an event service, which creates an environment in
which change is handled more efficiently.
The resulting traceability scheme is able to robustly
handle both long-term evolutionary change as well as the
shorter-term speculative change needed to support performance
related impact analysis. This
type of speculative change is vital to extending the life of a
software system, because it enables software architects to
answer “what-if” types of questions about the ability of the
system to adapt to change.
This
talk will introduce the basic concepts behind event-based
traceability, and describe this robust approach to handling
evolutionary and speculative change.
Areas of ongoing research related to automated event
recognition and the use of intelligent event servers will also
be addressed.
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