Managing Traceability Links with MaTraca

Traceability links are used to ensure co-evolution among related software artefacts. That is, to ensure that changes to the application are correctly and completely propagated. Much emphasis has been put on reverse engineering and co-evolution of vertical traceability links (i.e., across artefacts of the different levels of abstraction like UML, requirements documents, source code). However, today's applications require automatic support to deal with complex dependencies across heterogeneous source code entities (e.g., it is not uncommon for web applications to require multi-language and multi-paradigm programming). This paper introduces MaTraCa, an Eclipse plugin to maintain traceability links among entities of the same level of abstraction (i.e., code) in complex applications. MaTraCa stands for Managing Traceability Changes. MaTraCa focuses on horizontal links, that is, relations across software artefacts of the same level of abstraction such as source code, config files, html forms, etc.