A quality model for the systematic assessment of requirements traceability

Rempel, Patrick; Mäder, Patrick

doi:10.1109/re.2015.7320420

Cited by 18 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…While a number of empirical studies have been published on traceability, few studies are aimed at describing the state of the practice of traceability and practical challenges in general. Most studies focus on validating specific technical approaches [1,28,53], or specific aspects of traceability such as assessment [43] and benefits of traceability [29].…”

Section: Empirical Studies On Traceability Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Collaborative traceability management: a multiple case study from the perspectives of organization, process, and culture

et al. 2018

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Traceability is crucial for many activities in software and systems engineering including monitoring the development progress, and proving compliance with standards. In practice, the use and maintenance of trace links are challenging as artifacts undergo constant change, and development takes place in distributed scenarios with multiple collaborating stakeholders. Although traceability management in general has been addressed in previous studies, there is a need for empirical insights into the collaborative aspects of traceability management and how it is situated in existing development contexts. The study reported in this paper aims to close this gap by investigating the relation of collaboration and traceability management, based on an understanding of characteristics of the development effort. In our multiple exploratory case study, we conducted semistructured interviews with 24 individuals from 15 industrial projects. We explored which challenges arise, how traceability management can support collaboration, how collaboration relates to traceability management approaches, and what characteristics of the development effort influence traceability management and collaboration. We found that practitioners struggle with the following challenges: (1) collaboration across team and tool boundaries, (2) conveying the benefits of traceability, and (3) traceability maintenance. If these challenges are addressed, we found that traceability can facilitate communication and knowledge management in distributed contexts. Moreover, there exist multiple approaches to traceability management with diverse collaboration approaches, i.e., requirements-centered, developer-driven, and mixed approaches. While traceability can be leveraged in software development with both agile and plan-driven paradigms, a certain level of rigor is needed to realize its benefits and overcome challenges. To support practitioners, we provide principles of collaborative traceability management. The main contribution of this paper is empirical evidence of how culture, processes, and organization impact traceability management and collaboration, and principles to support practitioners with collaborative traceability management. We show that collaboration and traceability management have the potential to be mutually beneficial-when investing in one, also the other one is positively affected.

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Section: Empirical Studies On Traceability Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Collaborative traceability management: a multiple case study from the perspectives of organization, process, and culture

et al. 2018

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“…Study reference Title PS36 [53] Learning effective query transformations for enhanced requirements trace retrieval PS37 [65] Towards a generic framework for requirements traceability management for SysML language PS38 [66] Enhancing unsupervised requirements traceability with sequential semantics PS39 [54] Requirements Tracing on Target (RETRO) enhanced with an automated thesaurus builder PS40 [67] Exploring traceability links via issues for detailed requirements coverage reports PS41 [55] Tracing requirements to tests with high precision and recall PS42 [46] A context-based information retrieval technique for recovering use-case-to-source-code trace links in embedded software systems PS43 [68] Automatically tracing dependability requirements via term-based relevance feedback PS44 [98] A study to support agile methods through traceability PS45 [56] Ontology-based trace retrieval PS46 [69] An ontology-based multi-agent system to support requirements traceability in multi-site software development environment PS47 [100] An ontology-based approach to support for requirements traceability in agile development PS48 [101] Towards requirements reuse by implementing traceability in agile development PS49 [74] An empirical study on project-specific traceability strategies PS50 [80] Evolving software trace links between requirements and source code PS51 [79] Successful deployment of requirements traceability in a commercial engineering organization… really PS52 [75] Motivation matters in the traceability trenches PS53 [19] Towards end-to-end traceability: Insights and implications from five case studies PS54 [83] Traceability-based change awareness PS55 [23] Lightweight traceability for the agile architect PS56 [82] Wolf: Supporting impact analysis activities in distributed software development PS57 [81] Automatic traceability maintenance via machine learning classification PS58 [95] A quality model for the systematic assessment of requirements traceability PS59 [21] A streamlined, cost-effective database approach to manage requirements traceability PS60 [57] A comparative evaluation of two user-feedback techniques for requirements trace retrieval PS61 …”

Section: Idmentioning

confidence: 99%

What have we learnt from the challenges of (semi‐) automated requirements traceability? A discussion on blockchain applicability

2021

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Over the last 3 decades, researchers have attempted to shed light into the requirements traceability problem by introducing tracing tools, techniques, and methods with the vision of achieving ubiquitous traceability. Despite the technological advances, requirements traceability remains problematic for researchers and practitioners. This study aims to identify and investigate the main challenges in implementing (semi-)automated requirements traceability, as reported in the recent literature. A systematic literature review was carried out based on the guidelines for systematic literature reviews in software engineering, proposed by Kitchenham. We retrieved 4530 studies by searching five major bibliographic databases and selected 70 primary studies. These studies were analysed and classified according to the challenges they present and/or address. Twenty-one challenges were identified and were classified into five categories. Findings reveal that the most frequent challenges are technological challenges, in particular, low accuracy of traceability recovery methods. Findings also suggest that future research efforts should be devoted to the human facet of tracing, to explore traceability practices in organisational settings, and to develop traceability approaches that support agile and DevOps practices. Finally, it is recommended that researchers leverage blockchain technology as a suitable technical solution to ensure the trustworthiness of traceability information in interorganisational software projects.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

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“…For what concerns traceability, the majority of empirical studies on traceability, focuses on validating specific technical approaches [3,20,85], or specific aspects of traceability such as assessment [80] and benefits of traceability [66]. Demuth et al [22] conducted a study on how to use traceability for systems engineering to facilitate change notification and consistency checking of artifacts.…”

Section: Quality Assurance and Traceability Management Solutions In Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

The impact of requirements on systems development speed: a multiple-case study in automotive

et al. 2019

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Automotive manufacturers have historically adopted rigid requirements engineering processes. This allowed them to meet safety-critical requirements when producing a highly complex and differentiated product out of the integration of thousands of physical and software components. Nowadays, few software-related domains are as rapidly changing as the automotive industry. In particular, the needs of improving development speed are increasingly pushing companies in this domain toward new ways of developing software. In this paper, we investigate how the goal to increase development speed impacts how requirements are managed in the automotive domain. We start from a manager perspective, which we then complement with a more general perspective. We used a qualitative multiple-case study, organized in two steps. In the first step, we had 20 semi-structured interviews, at two automotive manufacturers. Our sampling strategy focuses on manager roles, complemented with technical specialists. In the second step, we validated our results with 12 more interviews, covering nine additional respondents and three recurring from the first step. In addition to validating our qualitative model, the second step of interviews broadens our perspective with technical experts and change managers. Our respondents indicate and rank six aspects of the current requirements engineering approach that impact development speed. These aspects include the negative impact of a requirements style dominated by safety concerns as well as decomposition of requirements over many levels of abstraction. Furthermore, the use of requirements as part of legal contracts with suppliers is seen as hindering fast collaboration. Six additional suggestions for potential improvements include domain-specific tooling, model-based requirements, test automation, and a combination of lightweight upfront requirements engineering preceding development with precise specifications post-development. Out of these 12 aspects, seven can likely be addressed as part of an ongoing agile transformation. We offer an empirical account of expectations and needs for new requirements engineering approaches in the automotive domain, necessary to coordinate hundreds of collaborating organizations developing software-intensive and potentially safety-critical systems.

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A quality model for the systematic assessment of requirements traceability

Cited by 18 publications

References 30 publications

Collaborative traceability management: a multiple case study from the perspectives of organization, process, and culture

Collaborative traceability management: a multiple case study from the perspectives of organization, process, and culture

What have we learnt from the challenges of (semi‐) automated requirements traceability? A discussion on blockchain applicability

The impact of requirements on systems development speed: a multiple-case study in automotive

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