Greater understanding through maintainer driven traceability

This paper describes some of the work being performed in the Esprit AMES (Application Management Environments Support) project. The different types of life cycle traceability are reviewed and examples of each are given. The aim of this paper is to present a method for the identification of traceability links of high level domain concepts. The objective of our method is to increase the accuracy levels and speed in which a maintainer gains an understanding of the system under maintenance. In addition, pre-maintenance preparation of a United Graph is also described and this is a prerequisite to the generation of our concept links. The method which is proposed and evaluated with the use of a case study, and some conclusions as to the methods use, are then drawn.