Design-code traceability for object-oriented systems

Traceability is a key issue to ensure consistency among software artifacts of subsequent phases of the development cycle. However, few works have so f ar addressed the theme of tracing object oriented (OO) design into its impl ementation and evolving it. This paper presents an approach to checking the compliance of OO design with respect to source code and support its evolut ion. The process works on design artifacts expressed in the OMT (Object Mod eling Technique) notation and accepts C++ source code. It recovers an "as i s" design from the code, compares the recovered design with the actual desi gn and helps the user to deal with inconsistencies. The recovery process ex ploits the edit distance computation and the maximum match algorithm to det ermine traceability links between design and code. The output is a similari ty measure associated to design-code class pairs, which can be classified a s matched and unmatched by means of a maximum likelihood threshold. A graph ic display of the design with different green levels associated to differen t levels of match and red for the unmatched classes is provided as a suppor t to update the design and improve its traceability to the code.