Modeling traceability of concerns in architectural views

Software architecture modeling includes the description of different views that represent the architectural concerns from different stakeholder perspectives. In case of evolution of the software system the related architectural views need to be adapted accordingly. For this it is necessary that the dependency links among the architectural concerns in the architectural views can be easily traced. Unfortunately, despite the ongoing efforts for modeling concerns in architectural views, the traceability of concerns remains a challenging issue in architecture design. We propose the concern traceability metamodel (CTM) that enables traceability of concerns within and across architectural views. The metamodel can be used for modeling the concerns, the architectural elements and the trace links among the elements in architectural views. We have implemented CTM in the tool M-Trace, that uses XML-based representations of the models and XQuery queries to represent tracing information. CTM and M-Trace are illustrated for analyzing the impact of concerns of a Climate Control System case.