Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
traceability link recovery
software architecture
software artifacts
consistency checking
software maintenance
The ARDoCo Tool Landscape: REST API, TraceView, and TraceViz for Architecture Traceability
🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the challenge of automatically recovering traceability links among software architecture documentation, models, and source code—a longstanding barrier to effective system maintenance and consistency assurance. To bridge this gap, we present the first end-to-end ecosystem for architecture-level traceability recovery, comprising a RESTful API supporting four distinct tracing pipelines, an interactive web-based frontend named TraceView, and TraceViz, an embedded visualization plugin for Visual Studio Code. The system integrates seamlessly into developer workflows through asynchronous task processing and caching optimizations, enabling intuitive exploration of traceability links directly within the IDE. All components are publicly deployed, and preliminary user studies indicate that TraceViz significantly enhances developers’ cognitive efficiency during software comprehension tasks.
📝 Abstract
Context and Problem. Software development produces interrelated artifacts like software architecture documentation (SAD), software architecture models (SAMs), and source code, whose relationships are essential for maintenance and consistency checking. However, automatically recovering links between these artifacts (traceability link recovery (TLR)) remains difficult to deploy in practice. Method and Aim. We present an accessible tool landscape for ARDoCo's TLR approaches: the ARDoCo REST API exposes four TLR pipelines (SAD-SAM, SAM-Code, SAD-Code, and SAD-SAM-Code) via HTTP endpoints with asynchronous execution and caching; TraceView is a browser-based frontend with a guided wizard and interactive multi-panel exploration of recovered links and inconsistencies; and TraceViz, which is a VS Code extension that overlays trace links directly onto documentation in the IDE. Results and Conclusion. All three components are publicly deployed and usable. A preliminary study for TraceViz's in-IDE visualization confirmed that it improves developer comprehension during software understanding tasks. The tool landscape makes state-of-the-art TLR accessible to architects, developers, and tool integrators. Video. We provide a screencast of our ARDoCo Tool Landscape and how it is used here: https://youtu.be/IOTEPZQ3tVs
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
traceability link recovery
REST API
interactive visualization
IDE integration
software architecture
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