Patent ID: 7765439

Claim:
A traceability management apparatus for providing traceability of a plurality of computer devices, each of the computer devices including hardware components that can be modified or added, the traceability management apparatus comprising: a software information acquisition part for acquiring installation history of software for each of said plurality of computer devices; a hardware information acquisition part for acquiring update information about said hardware components for each of said plurality of computer devices; a first device extracting part for, to trace the range of influence of a failure in software, extracting one or more computer devices which each have installed software containing said failure from said plurality of computer devices; and a second device extracting part for extracting a device which satisfies a hardware condition under which said failure occurs from the devices which have installed software containing said failure, thereby to identify a failure-affected computer device; wherein said hardware condition includes information identifying a type of hardware components to be conditioned, information identifying contents of said hardware components to be identified, and a comparison operator, and said second device extracting part compares the acquired update information about said hardware components of the devices which have installed software containing said failure, the type of said acquired update information being the type of hardware components to be conditioned included in said hardware condition, with the information identifying contents of said hardware components to be identified included in said hardware condition by the comparison operator included in said hardware condition, thereby judging whether said devices which have installed software containing said failure satisfy said hardware condition or not.