Requirements Traceability Ontology to Support Requirements Management

Requirements management (RM) is an important phase in software requirements engineering that addresses changes in the requirements over time. Any effective ontology of requirements management needs to support the capturing of all the artefacts at every stage of the development life cycle along with a flexible granularity that fits the chosen development framework and project characteristics. One of the artefact types captured in the ontology should be the requirement to support the impact analysis in the requirements change management. We report on the Requirements Traceability Ontology (RTOnto) which is designed to support a flexible trace granularity by separating the ontology into three layers. The second and third layers of the ontology can be adapted to a specific development framework. Artefacts in the ontology are classified into eight sub-classes to enable capturing artefacts at every development life cycle.