Traceclipse: An Eclipse Plug-in for Traceability Link Recovery and Management

Traceclipse is an Eclipse plugin which enables software developers to specify, view, and manipulate traceability links within Eclipse, and it provides an API through which recovery techniques may be added, specified and run within an integrated development environment.

Installation

To install the Traceclipse plugin, download the archive Traceclipse0.2.0-Plugins.zip, unzip it, and copy the jar files in the "plugins" folder inside your Eclipse 3.6 (or newer) home directory. After you restart Eclipse, the Traceclipse view should be available under Window -> Show View -> Other... -> Traceability -> Traceability Links View.

To load the Eclipse projects containing the Traceclipse source code, download the archive Traceclipse0.2.0-src.zip. In Eclipse 3.6 (or newer), import the projects into workspace (File -> Import... -> General -> Existing Projects into Workspace -> Select archive file and point to the previously downloaded file. Click Finish, and the project should be loaded into your workspace). Inside the workspace, open the file plugin.xml inside the project traceability and click Launch an Eclipse Application from the Overview tab.

You can use RealEstate (which is part of ROSE, the Repository for Open Software Education) to test Traceclipse’s functionality. Import RealEstate's source code into Eclipse, and in the workspace right click on the RealEstate project, and select Traceability -> Build project corpus... then in the Traceability Links Recovery wizard choose your parameters; for the Folder with documentation browse to the unzipped folder from RealEstateUseCases.zip, which contains 16 use cases, one per file, extracted from the pdf containing the RealEstate's use cases. The traceability links should appear in the Traceability Links View.

Traceclipse requires Eclipse 3.6 (or newer) and Java 1.6 and was tested primarily on Windows.

Publications

Samuel Klock, Malcom Gethers, Bogdan Dit, and Denys Poshyvanyk, Traceclipse: An Eclipse Plug-in for Traceability Link Recovery and Management, in Proceedings of the 6th ICSE2011 International Workshop on Traceability in Emerging Forms of Software Engineering (TEFSE2011), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, May 23, 2011, pp. 24-30.

API

Element Package Description
Traceability Links traceability.links API for interacting with traceability links
Manager traceability.management API for managing traceability links within a project
Recovery traceability.recovery
traceability.wizard		 API for building new recovery techniques
Interface traceability.dialog
traceability.popup.actions
traceability.views		 Elements of Traceclipse's user interface; the traceability links view; etc.
Miscellaneous traceability
traceability.util		 Miscellaneous/utility class definitions

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due in particular to Apache Lucene, which provides a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library.


People

  • Samuel Klock (main developer)

    E-mail: skkloc at cs dot wm dot edu

  • Malcom Gethers

    E-mail: mgethers at cs dot wm dot edu

  • Bogdan Dit

    E-mail: bdit at cs dot wm dot edu

  • Denys Poshyvanyk

    E-mail: denys at cs dot wm dot edu


We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the NSF on this research project.