Iresha Rubasinghe, Dulani Meedeniya, Indika Perera, Journal of Information Processing Systems Vol. 17, No. 5, pp. 972-988, Oct. 2021  

10.3745/JIPS.04.0225
Keywords: Computer-Aided Software Engineering, Continuous Integration, Software Artefact Consistency Management
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Abstract

At present, DevOps environments are getting popular in software organizations due to better collaboration and software productivity over traditional software process models. Software artefacts in DevOps environments are vulnerable to frequent changes at any phase of the software development life cycle that create a continuous integration continuous delivery pipeline. Therefore, software artefact traceability management is challenging in DevOps environments due to the continual artefact changes; often it makes the artefacts to be inconsistent. The existing software traceability related research shows limitations such as being limited to few types of artefacts, lack of automation and inability to cope with continuous integrations. This paper attempts to overcome those challenges by providing traceability support for heterogeneous artefacts in DevOps environments using a prototype named SAT-Analyser. The novel contribution of this work is the proposed traceability process model consists of artefact change detection, change impact analysis, and change propagation. Moreover, this tool provides multi-user accessibility and is integrated with a prominent DevOps tool stack to enable collaborations. The case study analysis has shown high accuracy in SAT-Analyser generated results and have obtained positive feedback from industry DevOps practitioners for its efficacy.

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