Enumeration and traceability tools for UNIXTM and WINDOWSTM environments
Abstract Enumeration and traceability software tools are used for enhancing in-process management and quality in system and product development in different industries, such as telecommunications and aerospace. These tools are used for managing the entities — system requirements, architecture descriptions, physical/logic designs, modules of source code, or test cases—of any hardware/software systems. Enumeration is a process for enclosing, labeling and numbering individual entities for further linking or referring to the related entities in one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many relationships. The entity dependencies in a set of documents determine the overall parent-child relationships of entities for specifying a system or a product. Traceability is a tracking and bookkeeping process for evolution and interaction of the individual entities in a system's or product's life cycle. The mechanism built by these two processes are for the functionality similar to hypertext mechanism for document browsing. However, these tools also provide forward-backward tracking for all linked entities, display the overall dependency in a form of a binary tree and perform bookkeeping on the entity changes. In the heterogeneous computing environments, these enumeration and traceability tools are built as add-on applications on the existing document authoring tools or editors for use in networking environment. For example, using a traceability tool with a messaging tool, e.g., e-mail, the project team members can work together as in a groupware and communicate timely about entity update information with other team members who own the impacted entities. In this paper, we present an enumeration and trace-ability tool (Radix) for use in two popular networking environments, UNIX and WINDOWS environments, with examples. This tool is currently used in AT&T service and product development organizations.