An analysis of the requirements traceability problem

Gotel, Olly; Finkelstein, Clive

doi:10.1109/icre.1994.292398

Cited by 792 publications

(592 citation statements)

References 49 publications

(46 reference statements)

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“…Automated requirements tracing approaches are also relevant for requirements conflict analysis: requirements tracing deals with identifying interdependencies between requirements [10] and conflicts between two requirements can be seen as a particular type of interdependency, i.e., tracing is a precondition for conflict analysis. There are reports on several trace automation approaches, such as Egyed's scenario-driven approach to traceability [6], Jackson's key-phrase-based traceability scheme [12].…”

Section: Requirement Conflicts Detection and Requirements Tracingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We addressed threats internal validity [10] of the study by two measures: a) intensive reviews of the study concept and materials, and b) a test run of the study conducted by a test person in order to make sure that the guidelines, explanations, and task descriptions are understandable for the participants and to estimate the required effort/time frame. Regarding external validity [30], we performed this initial case study in a professional context at a software development company.…”

Section: Threats To Validitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Requirements Management with Semantic Technology: An Empirical Study on Automated Requirements Categorization and Conflict Analysis

Moser

Winkler

Heindl

et al. 2011

Notes on Numerical Fluid Mechanics and Multidisciplinary Design

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Abstract.Requirements managers aim at keeping the set of requirements consistent and up to date throughout the project by conducting the following tasks: requirements categorization, requirements conflict analysis, and requirements tracing. However, the manual conduct of these tasks takes significant effort and is error-prone. In this paper we propose to use semantic technology as foundation for automating the requirements management tasks and introduce the ontology-based reporting approach OntRep. We evaluate the effectiveness and effort the OntRep approach based on a real-world industrial empirical study with professional Austrian IT project managers. Major results were that OntRep provides reasonable capabilities for the automated categorization of requirements, was when compared to a manual approach considerably more effective to identify conflicts, and produced less false positives with similar effort.

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Section: Requirement Conflicts Detection and Requirements Tracingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Threats To Validitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Requirements Management with Semantic Technology: An Empirical Study on Automated Requirements Categorization and Conflict Analysis

Moser

Winkler

Heindl

et al. 2011

Notes on Numerical Fluid Mechanics and Multidisciplinary Design

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Gotel and Finkelstein [8] reported in 1992 about a study with the aim of finding an explanation for the weak application of requirements traceability in practice, despite its numerous scientifically cited benefits. Major findings were that support for prerequirements traceability should be improved and that problems existed especially with the process and its stakeholder.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Requirements traceability is an important part of a software development process and defined as the "ability to follow the life of a requirement in both a backward and forward direction" [8]. Traceability influences the quality of software products positively, supports changes throughout the development life cycle and eases reuse of software assets [7,19,21].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Survey on Usage Scenarios for Requirements Traceability in Practice

Bouillon

Mäder

Philippow

2013

Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality

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Abstract. [Context and motivation]Requirements traceability is known as an important part of development projects. Studies showed that traceability is applied in practice, but insufficient tool-and method-support hinders its practical use. [Question/problem] We conducted a survey to understand which traceability usage scenarios are most relevant for practitioners. Gaining this information is a required step for providing better traceability support to practitioners. [Principal ideas/results] We identified a list of 29 regularly cited usage scenarios and asked practitioners to assess the frequency of use for each in a typical development project. Our analysis is restricted to those 56 participants that were actively using traceability in order to ensure comparable results. Subjects held various roles in the development and reported about diverse projects.[Contribution] This study provides not only an initial catalog of usage scenarios and their relevance, but also provides insights on practitioner's traceability practices. In result, we found all scenarios to be used by practitioners. Participants use traceability especially for: finding origin and rationale of requirements, documenting a requirement's history, and tracking requirement or task implementation state. Furthermore, we highlight topics for ongoing evaluation and better method and tool support in the area of requirements traceability.

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“…Requirements traceability is a challenging problem that involves describing and following a requirement in forward and backward directions [19]. While there are many benefits in retaining information about a requirement's life, the lack of automated techniques for generating traceability links can often make recovery a costly process.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Using heuristics to estimate an appropriate number of latent topics in source code analysis

Grant

Cordy

Skillicorn

2013

Science of Computer Programming

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Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a data clustering algorithm that performs especially well for text documents. In natural-language applications it automatically finds groups of related words (called "latent topics") and clusters the documents into sets that are about the same "topic". LDA has also been applied to source code, where the documents are natural source code units such as methods or classes, and the words are the keywords, operators, and programmer-defined names in the code. The problem of determining a topic count that most appropriately describes a set of source code documents is an open problem. We address this empirically by constructing clusterings with different numbers of topics for a large number of software systems, and then use a pair of measures based on source code locality and topic model similarity to assess how well the topic structure identifies related source code units. Results suggest that the topic count required can be closely approximated using the number of software code fragments in the system. We extend these results to recommend appropriate topic counts for arbitrary software systems based on an analysis of a set of open source systems.

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An analysis of the requirements traceability problem

Cited by 792 publications

References 49 publications

Requirements Management with Semantic Technology: An Empirical Study on Automated Requirements Categorization and Conflict Analysis

Requirements Management with Semantic Technology: An Empirical Study on Automated Requirements Categorization and Conflict Analysis

A Survey on Usage Scenarios for Requirements Traceability in Practice

Using heuristics to estimate an appropriate number of latent topics in source code analysis

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