Trace Matrix Analyzer (TMA)

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Abstract
A Trace Matrix (TM) represents the relationship between software engineering artifacts and is foundational for many software assurance techniques such as criticality analysis. In a large project, a TM might represent the relationships between thousands of elements of dozens of artifacts (for example, between design elements and code elements, between requirements and test cases). In mission- and safety-critical systems, a third party agent may be given the job to assess a TM prepared by the developer. Due to the size and complexity of the task, automated techniques are needed. We have developed a technique for analyzing a TM, called Trace Matrix Analyzer (TMA), so that third party agents can perform their work faster and more effectively. To validate, we applied TMA to two TMs with known problems and golden answersets: MoonLander and MODIS. We also asked an experienced software engineer to manually review the TM. We found that TMA properly identified TM issues and was much faster than manual review, but also falsely identified issues for one dataset. This work addresses the Trusted Grand Challenge, research projects 3, 5, and 6.