Tool support for traceability management of Software artefacts with DevOps practices

Abstract

Software development process encompasses multiple types of and differentiated versions of artefacts during the corresponding lifecycle. These artefacts are vulnerable to artefact drift or erosion when the product being developed gets changed. As a result different artefacts are subject to differential rates of updates compared to each other. Managing the software artefacts is one of the major problems in software industry. When the software process evolves the inconsistencies between artefacts also be evolve and it occurs within different rates. Traceability between software artefacts is considered as a very important factor in today development process. Traceability between artefacts helps the software professionals to track back and forth between artefacts. In order to identify and visualize different relationships between a selected set of software artefact types, Software Artefacts Traceability Analyzer (SAT-Analyzer) was designed and developed. This tool at present is supporting traceability management for requirement specification, design specification and source code. In this paper the work carried out extending SAT Analyzer to support DevOps practices with traceability. This research has considered the Testing artefacts, Configuration artefacts and Deployment artefacts for traceability management within DevOps practices. Adding continuous integration support to this tool is a main area of work as part of the research. Hence SAT Analyzer is linked with Jenkins continuous integration tool. At the same time the existing visualization of SAT Analyzer was enhanced to support DevOps related operations and testing, configuration and deployment traceability links. The evaluation of the modified SAT Analyzer was carried out with a case example and discussed in the paper.