Evolution-Driven Trace Acquisition in Eclipse-Based Product Line Workspaces

Software product lines typically are large-scale systems that are maintained and evolved over many years. New customer requirements, technology changes, and internal enhancements lead to continuous changes of product line artifacts. Managing these changes represents a key issue during evolution and traceability is success-critical for this process. In this chapter we discuss traceability challenges from a product line perspective and propose an approach that supports trace acquisition in product lines. The approach builds on our highly extensible EvoKing framework for the continuous tracking of changes in Eclipse workspaces. It supports both prospective and retrospective tracing at multiple levels of granularity. We demonstrate our approach using the mobile phone product line example.