The ARDoCo Tool Landscape: REST API, TraceView, and TraceViz for Architecture Traceability
For software architects and developers, this work provides practical, deployable tools for traceability link recovery, though the contribution is incremental as it focuses on tooling rather than novel algorithms.
The paper presents a tool landscape (REST API, TraceView, TraceViz) for ARDoCo's traceability link recovery approaches, making them accessible via HTTP endpoints, a browser frontend, and a VS Code extension. A preliminary study showed TraceViz improves developer comprehension during software understanding tasks.
Context and Problem. Software development produces interrelated artifacts like software architecture documentation (SAD), software architecture models (SAMs), and source code, whose relationships are essential for maintenance and consistency checking. However, automatically recovering links between these artifacts (traceability link recovery (TLR)) remains difficult to deploy in practice. Method and Aim. We present an accessible tool landscape for ARDoCo's TLR approaches: the ARDoCo REST API exposes four TLR pipelines (SAD-SAM, SAM-Code, SAD-Code, and SAD-SAM-Code) via HTTP endpoints with asynchronous execution and caching; TraceView is a browser-based frontend with a guided wizard and interactive multi-panel exploration of recovered links and inconsistencies; and TraceViz, which is a VS Code extension that overlays trace links directly onto documentation in the IDE. Results and Conclusion. All three components are publicly deployed and usable. A preliminary study for TraceViz's in-IDE visualization confirmed that it improves developer comprehension during software understanding tasks. The tool landscape makes state-of-the-art TLR accessible to architects, developers, and tool integrators. Video. We provide a screencast of our ARDoCo Tool Landscape and how it is used here: https://youtu.be/IOTEPZQ3tVs