Traceability management in a devops environment with continuous integration

Abstract

Software artefacts traceability is an important factor during the process of software development to analyse changes occur in software components. Traceability improves the quality attributes of software systems such that strengthens the testability, maintainability, reusability and helps for the system acceptance by providing consistent system documentation to the users. Meanwhile, the concept DevOps motivates towards the reduction of the gap between development and operations requiring considerable organizational changes. In a DevOps environment, significant software artefact changes are expectable rapidly where continuous integration is essential. Continuous integration is a cornerstone practice in DevOps that frequently merges developer working copies into a single shared branch. There is a requirement of determining and analysing the resulted impact of the traceability in order to make accurate change acceptance decisions during software development. Therefore, the core research problem addressed is determining a methodology for change detection and impact analysis together with software artefact synchronization to preserve consistency across all artefacts in a DevOps environment. A rule-based methodology is followed with visualization and analysis techniques applied on a proof-of-work traceability management prototype tool: SAT-Analyser 2.0. The evaluation results and industry-level user study results have shown the significant usefulness and suitability of the approach to a DevOps environment as well as to any software development process model.