Traceability in a Fine Grained Software Configuration Management System.

Traceability between artefacts from different domains (e.g. requirements management or test data management) is important in the software development process. Therefore modern application lifecycle management solutions support traceability links between these artefacts. But the support of traceability links into the source code is still very rudimentary or does not exist at all, although the source code is of central importance. Traceability links between artefacts in a repository and source code can break very easily when changing the text. To solve this problem we store the source code as Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) in a repository. A special editor for the source code, which supports refactoring, makes robust traceability between the AST artefacts and other artefacts possible. The repository provides the version history of all AST artefacts including their traceability links for a better understanding of changes over time. This paper introduces an implementation of such a system based on Eclipse.