Integrated Traceability and Change Management using Git: Treating Models like Source Code

Change always comes with effort. This effort increases if the change is not visible, planned, or well managed. Change management is key to successful handling, documentation, and integration of changes in projects—especially in complex systems.

Effective change management is often blocked by disconnected tools for requirements, architecture, design, and implementation. These silos cause broken traceability, inconsistent versions, and more manual effort to assess the impact of changes. Without integration, aligning changes across disciplines is slow and error-prone, making it hard to maintain a consistent, up-to-date system model.

This session introduces an approach inspired by software development practices using a git-style workflow with feature branches. These are triggered by issues that document the reason for change. As the change affects the entire system, it must be applied across the full toolchain.

In this example, requirements change in Jama Connect and the system model is updated in Enterprise Architect. Requirements are imported, with traceability links created to architecture elements, so the impact of changes can be assessed and the model adapted accordingly.

To verify the model changes, a pull request is created to merge them back into the main line. The updated model and requirements are reviewed in GitHub. Once approved, changes are merged back, and the adapted architecture is exported to Jama Connect to maintain traceability.