Introduction

Traceability practices should help stakeholders with the understanding, capturing, tracking and verification of software artefacts and their relationships. A proper realisation of traceability is a necessary system characteristic, as it supports software management, software evolution, verification and validation. It is fundamental for the definition of the results of many kinds of analysis of software models, such as change impact analysis, variability analysis and separation of concerns analysis.

In software product line engineering (SPLE), traceability is a key practice. It is necessary to support variability management and to keep the goals and the structure of the product line definition consistent, updated and valuable. Traceability information is rarely considered in an isolated way. It is captured, updated and analysed from multiple perspectives, such as domain engineering and application engineering.