Traceability measurement and improvement via recovering traceability links

As traceability is a factor in software maintainability, various methods have been reported to preserve it. However, perception of traceability tends to be subjective because there is no indicator which represents the degree of it. We propose an approach to measure traceability between a design model described in UML and source code written in object-oriented language. In detail, our approach maps a design to its implementation with the semi-automatic original algorithm and measures traceability with the Goal-Question-Metric approach. We apply the approach to pairs of a design model and source code and find that the degree of traceability can be presumed with a little work even by a third person.