A DSL for importing models in a requirements management system

Abstract

Requirements are artefacts often described with text and models. It is important to manage traceability between requirements and other software artefacts, including designs and test cases, also often captured with specialized models. Some Requirements Management Systems (RMS) support traceability relationships, between (textual) requirements artefacts in the RMS and model artefacts created outside the RMS, through complex standards or proprietary solutions. This paper proposes a new Domain-Specific Language (DSL) for describing the concepts of a modeling language intended to be traced using an RMS, with tool support handling the import and re-import of models and of their traceability links. The Model Import DSL (MI-DSL) is supported by an Xtext-based editor and the automatic generation of an import library targeting a leading RMS, namely IBM Rational DOORS. The language and the tools are demonstrated for model import and evolution scenarios with two different modeling languages. This work contributes a simple yet reliable mechanism to define and support traceability between requirements and models from different tools.