5 REQ lifecycle

lifecycle: Handling the lifecycle of collected data

Requirements traceability is done during the whole lifecycle of a project. Therefore, mantra must be able to handle continuous changes to collected data, while ensuring that the data used to generate traceability reports remains consistent throughout the project's lifecycle.

lifecycle.vcs: Integration with Version Control Systems

Most projects use version control systems (VCS) to manage their source code. mantra must be integratable in those VCS without hindering existing development workflows.

lifecycle.vcs.storage: Use human readable format to store collected data

mantra should not require to store binary files in a VCS to handle change detection, because binary files are impossible to humanly review in common VCS like git. With collected data being stored in a SQL database, the data must be extractable from the database and added back to the database before new data is collected to prevent wrong data history.

Implementation Details:

All collected data must be stored as JSON files in a sub-folder in the .mantra folder. These files serve as caches that will be imported into the SQL database before collecting new data.

lifecycle.project: Lifecycle of collected data for a project

The lifecycle of collected data for a project must be stored in a way that allows to distinguish work happening on different versions of a project. The base of these different versions of a project are referred to as project baselines in mantra. Linking collected data to a project baseline is important to show the state of a project that has multiple version lines. For example, a project may have a stable and unstable baseline.

lifecycle.project.id: Identification of a project baseline

A project must be uniquely identified by the name and base of a project. A project base might for example be a specific branch of a project.

Note: Using a project version as identifier and semantic versioning is not possible, because mantra must be usable for projects that do not follow semantic versioning, and multiple branches of a project may be based on the same version during development.

Implementation Details:

Each execution of mantra collect adds a new entry in the database to which all collected data of this execution is linked to. This entry is identified by a UTC timestamp, a hash over all collected data, and the project name and base. When generating traceability reports, mantra by default must only consider data that is linked to the project name and base which may either be set in mantra.toml, passed as arguments to mantra report, or be defined based on the used vcs.

lifecycle.project.default_base: Default project base

If no project base is set, mantra must use main as fallback name, because it is the common name for the default branch in new git repositories.