informalsystems / themis-tracer

A tool for managing complex contexts for developing critical systems
Apache License 2.0
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Investigate automating trace production #47

Open shonfeder opened 3 years ago

shonfeder commented 3 years ago

In Formal and Informal Aspects of Requirements Tracing, the author notes that the traces we document in requirements tracing are produced during the actual processes of specification, implementation, and verification. We can capture the trace in our records because the influences that connect the artifacts themselves leaves traces. If you can automate the production of these traces (i.e., automating the process of implementing a spec), you can capture the trace while it is created.

The dead simple way to implement this is to have a command like

tracer impl TAG.1::FOO.1

Which initiates a workflow for implementing the spec (building a focused contex (#41) for the implementer). This could be as simple as opening the users preferred editor to the correct repo for implementation, or could be as fancy as starting a PR setup and even generating some code annotated with the appropriate tag.