Traceability between Software Architecture Models

Software architecture (SA) is the blueprint of the software system and considered as one of the most important artifacts in component based development. The design and analysis of SA can be very complex. Under the inspiration of Model-Driven Development, the design of SA has been no more constrained in one stage. It is a trend to construct multiple SA models in multiple stages during the software life cycle. Thus, the traceability between these SA models becomes a new challenge. The information between these SA models in deferent stages is usually not recorded well and easy to be lost lately, which makes the maintenance and evolution difficult and error-prone. In this paper, we present an approach to recording the information between SA models via a traceability model for reducing the loss of design decisions and helping developers understand the software system well.