Empirical studies in software and systems traceability

Excerpt

Software and systems traceability is a critical element of any rigorous software development process and it is a required component of the approval and certification process in most safety- and security-critical systems. With the growing importance of these systems in our societies, traceability became a heavily studied research topic. Though important, traceability is also an element of software development processes that is most elusive. Manufacturers struggle in finding the right degree of traceability for their needs and in establishing accurate sets of traceability links. The cost, effort, and discipline needed to create and maintain trace links in a rapidly evolving software system can be extremely high. Moreover, its benefits often go unrealized in practice, either due to ill-defined and ad-hoc traceability processes, poor user training, or a lack of effective tool support. However, at the same time, traceability has been demonstrated as being able to reduce development effort and to improve development quality. …