Traceability

[LordLowrey]

With traceability issues in EA how do you go about illustrating dependencies between elements - i.e. demonstrating that a sequence diagram is dependant on a number of use cases which link back to requirements?

[«Midnight»]

A quick and simple way, would be to contain each group ('dependers' and 'dependees') of 'things' in its own package. Then you can draw, at a higher level, a diagram showing these packages, and link them with <<trace>> or <<dependency>> (or whatever) connectors.

[thomaskilian]

With traceability issues in EA how do you go about illustrating dependencies between elements - i.e. demonstrating that a sequence diagram is dependant on a number of use cases which link back to requirements?

I'd say a diagram is dependent on any UML element it is contained by it. What else dependency would you need?

[brownale2k]

We had the same issue, wanting our Use Cases to map to sequence diagrams so there would be visual traceability.  Right or wrong, here is what we did:

In our Use Case diagrams, we dropped a hyperlink of our Sequence diagrams onto the use case diagram.  Then, we used a dependency or trace link from the use case to point to the sequence diagram hyperlink.  As expected, one use case usually pointed to multiple sequence diagram hyperlinks.  In this manner, someone reviewing the use cases can click on a hyperlink that will take them to the supporting sequence diagrams.

We have a guy who is well-versed in Visual Basic, so he created a report that would query the EA database,  and,  for each use case, list all the sequence diagrams associated with that use case by following all the hyperlinks attached to a use case.  His report included which Use Cases had no hyperlinks (i.e., no sequence diagram yet) and which sequence diagrams were orphans (had no use case).

NOTE:  From an EA diagram perspective, it would be cool to be able to turn the dependency/trace links off, allowing someone to review the use cases themselves without the linkage clutter and then turn on the links again to view the details of mapping to sequence diagrams.

While this does not follow the UML standards, this has helped our design team tremendously.  We did not want to have to create and maintain additional allocation diagrams just to show the mappings between use cases and sequence diagrams.  

It will be interesting to hear how others addressed this issue.

[kanrijs]

We also had/have this issue.  We solved this for activity diagrams by make a composite activity for every diagram.  While this makes the activity appear in the hierarchy, this is by far not the ideal solution.
Direct linking to Diagrams would help us a lot.