An ontology for specifying and tracing requirements engineering artifacts and Test Artifacts

Abstract

Nowadays, modern software development processes follow an iterative approach, which makes possible to start the testing of a system at early stages. This approach requires recording the requirements artifacts that specify the functionality or characteristics required by the system, and the test cases that are derived from each requirement artifact. Frequently, software development organizations employ supporting tools to create and maintain these artifacts. There exist numerous tools for supporting requirements specification activities, as well as the definition and execution of test cases. These separate tools have their own databases and metamodels. The lack of integration between these tools leads to difficulties in tracing related artifacts and obtaining useful knowledge to manage the developing process. It is necessary to understand without ambiguities the concepts used by the different tools to allow them to interoperate. This paper proposes an ontology that defines and integrates the concepts included by the metamodels of different Requirements Engineering and Testing Management supporting tools. The formalization of these concepts and their relationships in an ontology language prevents ambiguity of the concepts and permit to the tools involved to interoperate with each other, to achieve semantic consistency and the tracing of artifacts. The proposed ontology used in conjunction with a reasoner provides capabilities to infer traces that are not explicit, which makes it possible to easily maintain artifacts and associations between them. The approach facilitates backward tracing from test cases to use cases and functional requirements artifacts, obtain knowledge about the causes of a defect or a poor specification, and enable impact analysis.