Through the combination of indexing requiments specification documents (especially IETF RFCs) and the use of attributes in OCaml source code referring to specific requirements, this tool can produce an annotated requirements specification that includes references to the code that implements and/or tests each requirement. This also allows unimplemented or untested requirements to be identified automatically.

Basics

References to Requirements

References from OCaml source code to requirements specifications is done using attribute syntax: http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/extn.html#attr-id

The most common case is to add an attribute after an expression:

let _ =
  hello (something 1) [@ref (rfc 9999) "s18"]

The above attribute is intended to express that the adjacent code implements the requirement defined in section 18 of fictional RFC 9999. Currently the hyperlink generated for such references links to the line of code, and is intended for human readers, so the precise placement of the attribute is not important.

References to Specification Documents

To make it easier to remember the meaning of RFC numbers, and to enable less verbose references, it is possible to express the same reference as follows:

[@@@specdoc let foo = rfc 9999]

let _ =
  hello (something 1) [@ref foo "s18"]

The name foo can be any OCaml identifier that has meaning to you.

Documents other than IETF RFCs can be referenced using URIs:

[@@@specdoc let reqif = uri "http://www.omg.org/spec/ReqIF/1.1/"]

Types of References

When verifying traceability the goal is typically to ensure that all requirements have been implemented, and also that all requirements have been tested.

To express the difference between implementation code and test code, use the following near the top of the source file:

[@@@reftype Impl]

or:

[@@@reftype Test]

Specification XML Format

The format of annotated specification documents is yet to be documented. An example can be found at:

https://github.com/infidel/ocaml-mdns/blob/master/doc/rfc6762_notes.xml

reqtrace tool invocation

To generate the necessary metadata required by the reqtrace tool, pass the -bin-annot option to the ocamlc compiler command. This will generate a .cmt file for each OCaml source file.

After compiling the code, invoke the reqtrace extract command and pass the path to the root directory containing the .cmt files:

reqtrace extract --strip=_build/ _build

This will generate a set of .req XML files in the same directory structure. The combine the specification XML with the references to generate an annotated specification in HTML format:

reqtrace html example_spec.xml --ref=_build --base=https://github.com/foo/bar/blob/master/ --out=example_spec.html

Support for camlp4

If your OCaml code requires preprocessing using camlp4 then only a subset of attribute syntax can be used, because of: camlp4/camlp4#55

The recommended usage is:

let _ =
  hello (something 1) [@ref foo "s18"]

One reason for this is that camlp4 does not support block attributes ([@@attr...]) or floating attributes ([@@@attr...]). While it is possible to use expression attributes for @specdoc and @reftype, this is not so convenient.

Since no @specdoc attribute defines the name foo, it is necessary to use the reqtrace command line option --rfc foo=9999 instead.

Unfortunately an attribute such as [@ref (rfc 1234) "s3_p2"] is corrupted by camlp4, causing it to be interpreted as [@ref rfc 1234 "s3_p2"], so named specifications are required.

Conversion of RFCs to XML

The annotated RFC 6762 specification mentioned above was initially generated by running:

parseietf.py rfc6762.txt --xml rfc6762_notes.xml

However, this script only been tested on very few IETF RFCs, so it is unlikely to work on a significant percentage of RFCs (because they were not really intended to be machine-readable).