¹E3S Research Center, Mohammed V.University in Rabat, Siweb, EMI, Morocco.
² IRIT/CNRS, University of Toulouse, France.

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Abstract—Tracingrequirements back to stakeholders and initial documents on one hand, and forward to their corresponding designed system artifacts, on the other hand, are crucial activities. Requirements are often expressed independently from those artifacts and can take several forms: texts or models. This makes hard and tedious the inference of trace links between requirements and artifacts. This paper introduces ReqDL, a domain-specific language for describing requirements and, at the same time, capturing bi-directional traceability data, which concerns more precisely system modeling elements. The paper also introduces a generation algorithm basedon ReqDL specifications in order to automatically generate independent trace models. Indeed, we present ReqDL concrete and abstract syntax in terms of grammar and metamodel.Using ReqDL expressions, we aim at assisting the traceabilityinformalizing easily understandable requirements and establishing an initial relationship between requirements and other system artifacts. The main resultis the generationof requirements traces modelswhich incorporate explicit and implicit trace links between requirements and design elements. Moreover, we provide a working example through which we demonstrate ReqDL practicality and usefulness.

Index Terms—Requirements engineering, model-based engineering, systems engineering, traceability, complex systems,metamodel, domain-specific language, ReqDL.

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Cite: Saida Haidrar,AdilAnwar,Jean-Michel Bruel,Ounsa Roudies, "A Domain-Specific Language to manage Requirements Traceability," Journal of Software vol. 13, no. 9, pp. 460-480, 2018.