TRACING DEPENDENCIES BETWEEN DEVELOPMENT ARTIFACTS IN A SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROJECT

A method for managing traceability links 60 in a software development project and a computer readable medium are described. A plurality of surrogates 54, 56 is stored in a traceability management storage 52. The surrogates are associates with development artifacts 40, 46 including artifact content of at least one of the types chosen from requirement, design, code, test, test result, or issue. The development artifacts are of a plurality of different storage format types editable and/ or visualizable by associated development tools. The development artifacts are stored in artifact storage 44, 50 different from the traceability management storage 52.The surrogates comprise at least a first surrogate 54 for a first development artifact 40 and a second surrogate 56 for a second development artifact 46. Each of the surrogates 54, 56 comprises at least an identification, a type of the artifact content, and a storage format type of the associated development artifact 40, 46. The surrogate does not comprise the entire artifact content of the associated development artifact. At least one traceability link is 60 stored in the traceability management storage 52 comprising at least a pointer to the first and second surrogates 54, 56.