A tool to manage traceability on several models and its use case

To examine requirements and design of a system, using graphical models such as UML is one of the effective ways because it helps developers to understand the system and activities using the system. Usually, more than two types of notations are used to represent a system. At the age of digital transformation, relationships among several different systems should be also discussed and they are of course represented in several different notations. To improve the development and the analysis of several systems using such several notations, traceability among elements in the different notations should be managed, but most techniques focus on the traceability among a single project. In this paper, we present a tool to manage traceability on several different models. The tool is developed as a plugin of an existing graphical modeling tool called Astah. Astah enables us to describe UML models as well as mind maps, data flow diagrams, flow charts and so on. To evaluate our tool, we performed a method to elicit requirements of several different systems together by using the tool. We confirmed our tool was helpful to perform the method, but some additional functions would improve the performance more than now. The additional functions are as follows: tracing links transitively, annotating each link to clarify its type and recording an end of a link while the end is removed from a model.