Provenance in Software Engineering –A Configuration Management View

摘要

Information provenance is a mechanism for tracing and verifying sources of information. In software development,rnprovenance can be seen in two dimensions: (a) traceability among different versions of the same artifact and (b) traceabilityrnamong various artifacts across system lifecycle. Maintaining the provenance, including the history of changes and thernrationale of changes, are critical in assessing change requests, identifying of appropriate products/builds, and ensuringrnconfiguration integrity. Although some Configuration Management (CM) tools support a form of provenance by keeping logsrnof changes, such logs are proprietary and cannot be migrated to other systems if needed. In this research, we demonstrate howrnprovenance can be achieved in configuration management by binding an artifact to its traceability and evolution informationrnand storing such information in XML-based metadata, so that the information can be moved along with the artifact from onernCM tool to another.