Although the benefits of requirements traceability are widely recognized, the actual practice of maintaining a traceability scheme is not always entirely successful. The traceability infrastructure underlying a software system tends to erode over its lifetime, as time-pressured practitioners fail to consistently maintain links and update impacted artifacts each time a change occurs, even with the support of automated systems. This paper proposes a new method of traceability based upon event-notification and is applicable even in a heterogeneous and globally distributed development environment. Traceable artifacts are no longer tightly coupled but are linked through an event service, which creates an environment in which change is handled more efficiently, and artifacts and their related links are maintained in a restorable state. The method also supports enhanced project management for the process of updating and maintaining the system artifacts.

Managing the development of large-scale software systems is a challenge to all software project managers due to the ever-increasing complexity inherent in the software development life-cycle. In this paper, a formalism intended to capture the concurrent and iterative nature of software development, called Software Project Management Net (SPMNet), is proposed in order to model software development projects. By augmenting and applying genetic algorithms in an innovative manner by sharply reducing the solution search-space complexity, SPMNet provides optimal or near-optimal solutions to the resource allocation and project scheduling problems. Results collected from simulation runs clearly support our approach for practical applications.