Maintaining traceability links during object-oriented software evolution

This paper presents a method to build and maintain traceability links and p roperties of a set of object-oriented software releases, The method recover s an 'as is' design from C++ software releases, compares recovered designs at the class interface level, and helps the user to deal with inconsistenci es by pointing out regions of code where differences are concentrated. The comparison step exploits edit distance and a maximum match algorithm. The m ethod has been experimented with on two freely available C++ systems, Resul ts as well as examples of applications to the visualization of the traceabi lity information and to the estimation of the size of changes during mainte nance are reported in the paper, Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.