Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 1.
Layers in our DW approach
able to easily analyze which requirements have been met and which elements
from the models will be affected by a change in a given requirement.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents related work
about traceability. Section 3 introduces our traceability metamodel for DWs
and the inclusion of trace models in our approach. Section 4 presents the QVT
rules for automatic derivation of traces in the DW context. Section 5 presents an
example of application, in order to show the benefits of our proposal and Section
6 outlines the conclusions and sketches the future work to be done in this area.
2 Related Work
In this section, we will discuss the existing traceability research in other fields,
its benefits and problems, and we will also discuss its current status in the DW
field. Currently, traceability can be studied from two different points of view.
The first one is the Requirements Engineering (RE) field, whereas the second
one is the Model Driven Development (MDD) field. Although both fields are
focused in different aspects of traceability, they also have some common issues.
Most of the work done until now has been in the RE field [1,2,3,8,9,23,26,31].
Some authors [8, 29] consider pre-requirement specification (pre-RS) as a more
complex scenario, since it has to deal with artifacts written in natural language
and different points of view, and post-requirement specification (post-RS) as a
simpler, one since the requirements are already modeled.
The main benefits provided by traceability have been studied in this field
[2, 23, 24]. Traceability helps assesing the impact of changes and rationale com-
prehension, by identifying which parts of the implementation belong to each
requirement [2]. It also helps the reusability and maintainability, since the scope
of each part of the project is known and defined thanks to the traces. In turn,
these benefits help lowering the costs associated with the project [23, 24].
The main drawbacks mentioned about traceability are the non-existence of a
standard traceability definition or metamodel, the manual recording of traces,
