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present.The second problem is the opposite:a variant has been
selectedbuttheconfigurationchoicewouldhavetoeliminateit.
Testing the commonalities is mandatory, but testing the most
used variants in the products could be critical.Thus,it is a good
practice to test the reference or base application intensively
and to elaborate a plan for re-using testing artifacts.
2.9.4.
Traceability
Traceability means to follow the life and the dependencies
of the artifacts in the development cycle with the software
evolution. Traceability is a necessary system characteristic;
for example, to support software management, change
impact analysis, software evolution, and validation. Providing
traceability support during product line development is
a complex feature since it concerns every artifact, every
development step or iteration, configuration, and evolution
management. Traditionally, links between artifacts of a single
development step are called vertical traceability, and links
between artifacts of two or more development steps are
called horizontal traceability. However, SPLE introduces two
new dimensions [ANQ 09] into the field of traceability. The
first dimension is traceability of
variations
, which goes from
domain engineering to application engineering level. The
second dimension is related to configuration management and
software evolution, which carries a notion of
traceability in
time
. This means that the software product line process has
to be modeled, artifacts have to be extended to cope with
tracing, and a traceability tool chain needs to be designed and
implemented.
Traceability is needed for various purposes and at various
levels of granularity. We can expect to trace some parts of the
general software process and in case of problems to generate
finer trace sets. This is difficult to achieve when the process
is only manual. We should collect as much information as
possible. A challenge is the management of a huge amount of
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