The documentation of software architecture traceability links is the foundation for many important architecture management activities, such as verification and validation, reuse evaluation and impact analysis. In practice, the construction and maintenance of traceability links is mostly manual, which is labor-intensive and error prone. Although the costs of manual traceability in terms of the time, effort and money required can be mitigated by automated construction, the completeness and correctness of traceability links tends to be negatively affected by automation in their creation and maintenance. This paper presents a pattern language for construction and maintenance of software architecture traceability links to requirements and source code. As a foundation for deriving the pattern language, we have performed systematic literature reviews, investigations of traceability links for multiple open-source software systems, and empirical studies. In particular, we studied the nature of the software architecture traceability phenomenon and its driving factors and impacts, as well as the methods that provide the means to control software architecture traceability. The derived pattern language provides support for addressing multiple decision categories for construction and maintenance of software architecture traceability links. To illustrate the patterns, their application is shown in the context of constructing and maintaining traceability links for an open source framework for mobile games.

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