An empirical study on project-specific traceability strategies

Abstract

Abstract-Effective requirements traceability supports practitioners in reaching higher project maturity and better product quality. Researchers argue that effective traceability barely happens by chance or through ad-hoc efforts and that traceability should be explicitly defined upfront. However, in a previous study we found that practitioners rarely follow explicit traceability strategies. We were interested in the reason for this discrepancy. Are practitioners able to reach effective traceability without an explicit definition? More specifically, how suitable is requirements traceability that is not strategically planned in supporting a project's development process. Our interview study involved practitioners from 17 companies. These practitioners were familiar with the development process, the existing traceability and the goals of the project they reported about. For each project, we first modeled a traceability strategy based on the gathered information. Second, we examined and modeled the applied software engineering processes of each project. Thereby, we focused on executed tasks, involved actors, and pursued goals. Finally, we analyzed the quality and suitability of a project's traceability strategy. We report common problems across the analyzed traceability strategies and their possible causes. The overall quality and mismatch of analyzed traceability suggests that an upfront-defined traceability strategy is indeed required. Furthermore, we show that the decision for or against traceability relations between artifacts requires a detailed understanding of the project's engineering process and goals; emphasizing the need for a goal-oriented procedure to assess existing and define new traceability strategies.

Software traceability: trends and future directions

“…Promising examples include a valuebased approach to determine what traces to capture, and adaptive strategies to e↵ectively migrate between simple and more detailed forms of traceability as needs evolve [26]. Case study reports provide mature insights into industrial practices for planning and managing traceability [51,79,78,75,71,38], suggesting that the potential for researchers and practitioners to work together to synthesize lessons and inform practice is now mature.…”

Continuous assessment of software traceability

“…Instead, traceability in current software development practices is rarely planned or systematically created but rather a desultory ad-hoc effort and often implemented as an afterthought [Rempel et al 2013;Mäder et al 2013]. Besides, traceability is mostly implemented by humans who make mistakes that often remain undetected [Hayes and Dekhtyar 2005;Regan et al 2012].…”

“…Some safety domains even developed domain-specific guidelines (e.g., avionics: , space: [ECSS 2009], automotive: [ISO 26262-6:2011], railway: [CENELEC 2011], medical: [FDA 2002) to address their particular needs. Although these guidelines were created to support practitioners, organizations in practice struggle to implement accurate and complete sets of trace links [Rempel et al 2013;Mäder et al 2013;Rempel et al 2014]. An analysis of the traceability information submitted by various organizations to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as part of the medical device approval process in the United States showed a significant traceability gap between the traceability expectations as laid out in the FDA's "Guidance for the Content of Premarket Submissions for Software Contained in Medical Devices" [FDA 2002], and the traceability data documented in the submissions .…”

“…Ramesh and Jarke provide a comprehensive classification of possible trace link semantics in [Ramesh and Jarke 2001] that can be used to select appropriate keywords for trace link semantics. Another prior study showed that these keywords can also be used very effectively in interviews with agents and stakeholders to identify activities that require traceability in projects that are driven by the value of implemented traceability [Rempel et al 2013].…”

Mind the gap: assessing the conformance of software traceability to relevant guidelines

“…Organizations struggle to establish and maintain accurate and complete sets of traceability links [5,38,49,48,39]. A prior analysis of the traceability information submitted by various organizations to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as part of the medical device approval process, showed a significant traceability gap between the traceability expectations as laid out in the FDA's "Guidance for the Content of Premarket Submissions for Software Contained in Medical Devices" [21], and the traceability data documented in the submissions [39].…”