A survey of traceability in requirements engineering and model-driven development

Abstract

Traceability-the ability to follow the life of software artifacts-is a topic of great interest to software developers in general, and to requirements engineers and model-driven developers in particular. This article aims to bring those stakeholders together by providing an overview of the current state of traceability research and practice in both areas. As part of an extensive literature survey, we identify commonalities and differences in these areas and uncover several unresolved challenges which affect both domains. A good common foundation for further advances regarding these challenges appears to be a combination of the formal basis and the automated recording opportunities of MDD on the one hand, and the more holistic view of traceability in the requirements engineering domain on the other hand.Keywords Requirements engineering · Model-driven engineering · Model-driven development · Traceability

A Survey on Usage Scenarios for Requirements Traceability in Practice

“…We agree with Winkler and von Pilgrim that it is an important research task to study traceability practices in order to propose and develop traceability support that suits practical needs [21]. With traceability practice, we mean the way in which traceability is used by practitioners.…”

“…In order to create a comprehensive list of usage scenario candidates, we started to gather information from the three main literature surveys previously conducted on requirements traceability: Spanoudakis and Zisman [19], von Knethen and Paech [20], and Winkler and Pilgrim [21]. All provide lists of development activities supported by traceability (see Section 2).…”

“…Traceability influences the quality of software products positively, supports changes throughout the development life cycle and eases reuse of software assets [7,19,21]. The importance of traceability is also demonstrated, as it is a precondition for the development of safety-critical systems in various domains, e.g., in aerospace (ISO12207, DO-178B), and in railways (EN50128).…”

“…The community of traceability researchers agrees on the fact that project-specific traceability strategies are required for a successful traceability implementation [6,10,21]. However, that does not mean that each traceability strategy and their parts are unique.…”

“…Spanoudakis and Zisman [19] refer to a number of possible usage scenarios for traceability. Finally, Winkler and Pilgrim [21] also collected possible usage scenarios for traceability.…”