Determining the cost-quality trade-off for automated software traceability

Abstract

Major software development standards mandate the establishment of trace links among software artifacts such as requirements, architectural elements, or source code without explicitly stating the required level of detail of these links. However, the level of detail vastly affects the cost and quality of trace link generation and important applications of trace analysis such as conflict analysis, consistency checking, or change impact analysis. In this paper, we explore these cost-quality trade-offs with three case study systems from different contexts -the open-source ArgoUML modeling tool, an industrial route-planning system, and a movie player. We report the cost-quality trade-off of automated trace generation with the Trace Analyzer approach and discuss its expected impact onto several applications that consume its trace information. In the study we explore simple techniques to predict and manipulate the cost-benefit trade-off with threshold-based filtering. We found that (a) 80% of the benefit comes from only 20% of the cost and (b) weak trace links are predominantly false trace links and can be efficiently eliminated through thresholds.

Effective requirements traceability: Models, tools, and practices

“…Gotel [13] found that traceability failures primarily happened because of a breakdown of communication between developers, lack of time in the schedule, lack of tool support, and a perception from the product team that the effort required to maintain traceability was excessive. By picking the right implementation strategy for the product team, the cost of implementation versus the benefit of effective traceability can be optimized [9].…”

“…If properly implemented, traceability can provide significant benefits. However, its cost can also be significant [9,19]. Therefore a strategy for its implementation must be carefully defined by examining and correlating the set of business, project, product, and technology factors.…”

Reuse or rewrite: Combining textual, static, and dynamic analyses to assess the cost of keeping a system up-to-date

“…Spanoudakis et al [17] discuss rule-based traceability of UML models and code. Egyed et al [8] discuss value-based traceability. Hayes et al [10] discuss the use of feedback as well as introduce measures for evaluating traceability methods.…”

Risk management with enhanced tracing of requirements rationale in highly distributed projects

“…Consequently, value considerations are fundamental to motivate sustainable systematic requirements tracing activities [1]. Initial case studies and value-based software engineering analyses on systematic tracing have provided evidence on options to save considerable parts of tracing costs without sacrificing substantial benefits [7][8] [12].…”