Trace: Tracking Dependencies

Traceability helps you to identify the way a given requirement or process has been implemented in a system, providing facilities to follow the path of dependencies from the initial request, through a modeled solution, to the deployed physical system or process. A well developed model provides full traceability in any direction, providing answers to questions such as "Why was that particular hardware used in the solution?", assuming there is traceability back to a requirement that specified particular response times or functional capability.

The result sets can be used to manage elements, to create documentation or to find the location of elements within the complete model structure.

Traceability Tools

Enterprise Architect provides a number of tools for tracing the definition and implementation of a process, from initial requirement to generated code or technical deployment, or vice versa.  Such tools include the:

The Traceability window, in particular, is designed to provide very detailed information on an element's relationships and dependencies, both immediate and distant.

Tracing Transformations

If you have performed any transformations in developing your model and code, Enterprise Architect automatically creates Transformation Dependency connectors that you can trace - using the Traceability window - to establish what objects and code have been generated from each PSM element, or what the initial PSM element was for a generated object.

Whether you use transformations or develop the stages of the model in other ways, you can build up a range of Traceability diagrams (Custom diagrams) to identify the development pathway and the dependencies between entities such as Requirements, Use Cases, Classes, Packages, Test Cases and other model artifacts, or even between these entities and the overall business process model.

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