Dynamic traceability links supported by a system architecture description

To reduce the effort spent on system comprehension during software maintenance, easy access to different types of information describing the system features is necessary. This is used by the maintainer to build a mental model of the software. Links relating different types of information are often implicit, and are called traceability links. Extracting all traceability links of possible interest from the system documentation would be an extremely complex operation. Storing and updating a database of such information manually would be an expensive task. We propose that the identification of information about a feature is done dynamically. The maintainer is provided with a powerful query mechanism for identifying a starting point for collecting the information. Further information is identified dynamically by automatically expanding several predefined types of traceability links. This avoids the problems of the traditional database approach. To make the query mechanism scalable, an architectural description of the system is used to limit the size of information which must be inspected by a query