ABSE Improves Requirements and Feature Traceability

One of the most common causes of runaway projects are unstable (constantly changing) requirements.

When a project moves from the requirements phase to the design phase, the solution process's complexity will cause an explosion of derived requirements. This list of derived requirements for the design phase often becomes 50 times longer than the list of original requirements.

This requirements explosion is partly why it is difficult to implement requirements traceability (tracing the original requirements through the application lifecycle), even if everyone agrees this is always useful and desirable.

Software requirements are granular in its nature: they can become very small parts of the project's whole, grouping together at least some lines of code.

ABSE groups together code and/or features at varying abstraction levels. You can create Atoms that reflect the project's own requirements, making them easy to change, track, analyze or report.

In the above diagram, a requirement Atom is linking to its two related project features that were implemented with Atoms from an Atom Library. When passed through the Code Generator, these Atoms will generate some lines of code in several files. The code generator keeps track of which Atom generated a given source line.

Therefore, by choosing any given generated line, you can get its generator Atom. And because that Atom is linked to a requirement Atom, you can know to which requirement any source line belongs to.

Additionally, you can list, for any given requirement, which Atoms are implementing it, and what source lines were generated to satisfy such requirement.