Managing complexity in ICT systems development

Traceability is the common term for mechanisms to record and navigate relationships between artifacts produced by development and dependability assessment processes. The effective management of these relationships is crucial in dealing with the complexities inherent in telecommunications and other ICT systems (i.e., complexity caused by the problem to be solved) which stem from diverse and often conflicting requirements on performance, real-time behaviour, fault tolerance, security and dependability, etc. Practitioners employ a range of notations to model and assess such systems. Most have tool support, although a lack of well defined approaches to integration limits the traceability between their respective data sets. That in turn adds further accidental complexity (i.e., self-created problems which can be fixed) to the inherent complexity referred to previously. This paper proposes a framework known as MATra which remedies that particular complexity by enabling links to be established and consistency to be maintained across data from potentially disjoint tools.