TimeTracer: a tool for back in time traceability replaying

Ensuring correct trace links between different types of artifacts (requirements, architecture, or code) is crucial for compliance in safety-critical domains, for consistency checking, or change impact assessment. The point in time when trace links are created, however, (i.e., immediately during development or weeks/months later) has a significant impact on its quality. Assessing quality thus relies on obtaining a historical view on artifacts and their trace links at a certain point in the past which provides valuable insights on when, how, and by whom, trace links were created. This work presents TimeTracer, a tool that allows engineers to go back in time – not just to view the history of artifacts but also the history of trace links associated with these artifacts. TimeTracer allows easy integration with different development support tools such as Jira; and it stores artifacts, traces, and changes thereof in a unified artifact model.