Traceability Establishment and Visualization of Software Artefacts in DevOps Practice: A Survey

DevOps based software process has become popular with the vision of an effective collaboration between the development and operations teams that continuously integrates the frequent changes. Traceability manages the artefact consistency during a software process. This paper explores the trace-link creation and visualization between software artefacts, existing tool support, quality aspects and the applicability in a DevOps environment. As the novelty of this study, we identify the challenges that limit the traceability considerations in DevOps and suggest research directions. Our methodology consists of concept identification, state-of-practice exploration and analytical review. Despite the existing related work, there is a lack of tool support for the traceability management between heterogeneous artefacts in software development with DevOps practices. Although many existing studies have low industrial relevance, a few proprietary traceability tools have shown a high relevance. The lack of evidence of the related applications indicates the need for a generalized traceability approach. Accordingly, we conclude that the software artefact traceability is maturing and applying collaboratively in the software process. This can be extended to explore features such as artefact change impact analysis, change propagation, continuous integration to improve software development in DevOps environments.

@article{Meedeniya2019,
  title     = {Traceability Establishment and Visualization of Software Artefacts in DevOps Practice: A Survey},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {10},
  number    = {7},
  year      = {2019},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {D A Meedeniya and I. D. Rubasinghe and I. Perera},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2019.0100711},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2019.0100711}
}