Software traceability: trends and future directions

Abstract

Software traceability is a sought-after, yet often elusive quality in software-intensive systems. Required in safety-critical systems by many certifying bodies, such as the USA Federal Aviation Authority, software traceability is an essential element of the software development process. In practice, traceability is often conducted in an ad-hoc, after-the-fact manner and, therefore, its benefits are not always fully realized. Over the past decade, researchers have focused on specific areas of the traceability problem, developing more sophisticated tooling, promoting strategic planning, applying information retrieval techniques capable of semi-automating the trace creation and maintenance process, developing new trace query languages and visualization techniques that use trace links, and applying traceability in specific domains such as Model Driven Development, product line systems, and agile project environments. In this paper, we build upon a prior body of work to highlight the state-of-the-art in software traceability, and to present compelling areas of research that need to be addressed.

An Overview of Traceability: Towards a general multi-domain model

“…As in [8], ubiquitous traceability is achieved automatically, as a result of collecting, analysing, and processing every piece of evidence from which trace data can be inferred and managed.…”

“…It is the ability to inter-relate any uniquely identifiable software engineering artefact to any other, to maintain the required links over time, and to use the resulting network to answer questions of both the software product and its development process [8]. It is a key element of any rigorous software development process that, provides critical support for many development activities [18].…”

“…More details about software traceability were listed in [8], including seven research areas and their associated directions which must be addressed in order to achieve ubiquitous traceability.…”

Automated change impact analysis between SysML models of requirements and design

“…We characterize the required traceability information via the traceability information model (TIM) of Figure 5. TIMs are a common way of specifying how different development artifacts (and the elements thereof) should be traced to one another in order to support specific analytical tasks [12,13,14].…”

D3TraceView: A Traceability Visualization Tool

“…Despite its importance, there are still several significant challenges associated with traceability, as described in [7]. In addition, in [3] the authors present several compelling areas of research that need to be addressed in order to support the challenges. One of these areas is concerned with the visualization of trace data.…”