Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research

Measurement with Persons: A European Network

The European ‘Measuring the Impossible’ Network MINET promotes new research activities in measurement dependent on human perception and/or interpretation. This includes the perceived attributes of products and services, such as quality or desirability, and societal parameters such as security and well-being. Work has aimed at consensus about four ‘generic’ metrological issues: (1) Measurement Concepts & Terminology; (2) Measurement Techniques: (3) Measurement Uncertainty; and (4) Decision-making & Impact Assessment, and how these can be applied specificallyto the ‘Measurement of Persons’ in terms of ‘Man as a Measurement Instrument’ and ‘Measuring Man.’ Some of the main achievements of MINET include a research repository with glossary; training course; book; series of workshops;think tanks and study visits, which have brought together a unique constellation of researchers from physics, metrology,physiology, psychophysics, psychology and sociology. Metrology (quality-assured measurement) in this area is relativelyunderdeveloped, despite great potential for innovation, and extends beyond traditional physiological metrology in thatit also deals with measurement with all human senses as well as mental and behavioral processes. This is particularlyrelevant in applications where humans are an important component of critical systems, where for instance health andsafety are at stake

Traceability -- A Literature Review

In light of recent food safety crises and international trade concerns associated with food or animal associated diseases, traceability has once again become important in the minds of public policymakers, business decision makers, consumers and special interest groups. This study reviews studies on traceability, government regulation and consumer behaviour, provide case studies of current traceability systems and a rough breakdown of various costs and benefits of traceability. This report aims to identify gaps that may currently exist in the literature on traceability in the domestic beef supply chain, as well as provide possible directions for future research into said issue. Three main conclusions can be drawn from this study. First, there is a lack of a common definition of traceability. Hence identifying similarities and differences across studies becomes difficult if not impossible. To this end, this study adopts CFIA’s definition of traceability. This definition has been adopted by numerous other agencies including the EU’s official definition of traceability however it may or may not be acceptable from the perspective of major Canadian beef and cattle trade partners. Second, the studies reviewed in this report address one or more of five key objectives; the impact of changing consumer behaviour on market participants, suppliers incentive to adopt or participate in traceability, impact of regulatory changes, supplier response to crisis and technical description of traceability systems. Drawing from the insights from the consumer studies, it seems as if consumers do not value traceability per se, traceability is a means for consumers to receive validation of another production or process attribute that they are interested in. Moreover, supply chain improvement, food safety control and accessing foreign market segments are strong incentives for primary producers and processors to participate in programs with traceability features. However the objectives addressed by the studies reviewed in this paper are not necessarily the objectives that are of most immediate relevance to decision makers about appropriate traceability standards to recommend, require, subsidize etc. In many cases the research objectives of previous work have been extremely narrow creating a body of literature that is incomplete in certain key areas. Third, case studies of existing traceability systems in Australia, the UK, Scotland, Brazil and Uruguay indicate that the pattern of development varies widely across sectors and regions. In summary, a traceability system by itself cannot provide value-added for all participants in the industry; it is merely a protocol for documenting and sharing information. Value is added to participants in the marketing chain through traceability in the form of reduced transactions costs in the case of a food safety incident and through the ability to shift liability. To ensure consumer benefit and have premiums returned to primary producers the type of information that consumers value is an important issue for future research. A successful program that peaks consumer interest and can enhance their eating experience can generate economic benefits to all sectors in the beef industry. International market access will increasingly require traceability in the marketing system in order to satisfy trade restrictions in the case of animal diseases and country of origin labelling, to name only a few examples. Designing appropriate traceability protocols industry wide is therefore becoming very important.traceability, institutions, Canada, consumer behaviour, producer behaviour, supply chain, Agricultural and Food Policy, Consumer/Household Economics, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Health Economics and Policy, International Relations/Trade, Livestock Production/Industries, Marketing, Production Economics, D020, D100, D200, Q100,

Analysing Source Code Structure and Mining Software Repositories to Create Requirements Traceability Links

Resume La traçabilité est le seul moyen de s'assurer que le code source d'un système est conforme aux exigences et que toutes ces exigences et uniquement celles-ci ont été implantées par les développeurs. Lors de la maintenance et de l'évolution, les développeurs ajoutent, suppriment ou modifient des fonctionnalités (y compris les fautes) dans le code source. Les liens de traçabilité deviennent alors obsolètes car les développeurs n'ont pas ou ne peuvent pas consacrer les efforts nécessaires pour les mettre à jour. Pourtant, la récupération de liens de traçabilité est une tâche ardue et coûteuse pour les développeurs. Par conséquent, nous trouvons dans la littérature des méthodes, des techniques et des outils pour récupérer ces liens de traçabilité automatiquement ou semi-automatiquement. Parmi les techniques proposées, la littérature montre que les techniques de recherche d'information (RI) peuvent récupérer automatiquement des liens de traçabilité entre les exigences écrites sous forme textuelle et le code source. Toutefois, la précision et le rappel des techniques RI sont affectés par certains facteurs qui influencent les entrées du processus de traçabilité des exigences. En raison de la faible précision et du faible rappel de ces techniques, la confiance des développeurs en l'efficacité des techniques de récupération des liens de traçabilité est affectée négativement. Dans cette thèse, notre proposition est que l'ajout de nouvelles sources d'information et l'intégration des connaissances des développeurs à l'aide d'un modèle de confiance pourrait atténuer l'impact de ces facteurs et améliorer la précision et le rappel des techniques RI. Notre hypothèse est que la précision et le rappel des techniques RI pourraient être améliorés si deux (ou plus) sources d'information confirment un lien de traçabilité. Nous utilisons les données des référentiels logiciels, les relations entre classes, le partitionnement du code source, et les connaissances des développeurs comme sources d'informations supplémentaires pour confirmer un lien. Nous proposons quatre nouvelles approches de détection des liens de traçabilité : Histrace, BCRTrace, Partrace et une dernière basée sur les connaissances des développeurs. Nous proposons un modèle de confiance, Trumo, inspiré des modèles de confiance Web, pour combiner les votes des experts. Nous proposons alors quatre approche de recouvrement des liens de traçabilité : Trustrace, LIBCROOS, COPARVO et une nouvelle méthode d'attribution de poids, qui utilisent les experts créés précédemment et Trumo. Les approches proposées utilisent une technique de recherche d'information pour créer des liens de référence et utilisent l'opinion des experts pour réévaluer ces liens de référence. Nous montrons que l'utilisation de plusieurs sources d'information améliore la précision et le rappel des techniques RI pour la traçabilité des exigences. Les résultats obtenus dans cette thèse montrent une amélioration de jusqu'à 22% de précision, 7% de rappel et 83% de réduction d'effort des développeurs pour la suppression manuelle de liens faux positifs. Les résultats obtenus dans cette thèse sont prometteurs et nous espérons que d'autres recherches dans ce domaine pourraient améliorer notre précision et rappel encore plus.----------ABSTRACT Traceability is the only means to ensure that the source code of a system is consistent with its requirements and that all and only the specified requirements have been implemented. During software maintenance and evolution, as developers add, remove, or modify features (including bugs), requirement traceability links become obsolete because developers do not/cannot devote effort to update them. Yet, recovering these traceability links later is a daunting and costly task for developers. Consequently, the literature proposed methods, techniques, and tools to recover semi-automatically or automatically these traceability links. Among the proposed techniques, the literature showed that information retrieval (IR) techniques can automatically recover traceability links between free-text requirements and source code. However, precision and recall of IR techniques are impacted by some factors, which impact the input of requirements traceability process. Due to low precision and--or recall, developers' confidence in the effectiveness of traceability link recovery technique is negatively affected. In this dissertation, our thesis is that adding more sources of information using a trust-based model and integrating developers' knowledge in automated IR-based requirements traceability approaches could mitigate the impact of the factors and improve the precision and recall of IR techniques. Our conjecture is that the accuracy of information retrieval techniques could be improved if two (or more) sources of information vote for a link. We use software repositories' data, binary class relationships, source code partitioning, and developer's knowledge as extra sources of information to confirm a link. We propose four approaches, Histrace, BCRTrace, Partrace, and developer's knowledge, to create experts out of the available extra sources of information. We propose a trust-model, Trumo, inspired by Web trust-models of users, to combine the experts' votes. We then propose four traceability link recovery approaches: Trustrace, LIBCROOS, COPARVO, and an improved term weighting scheme, which use the experts created by previous four techniques and Trumo. The proposed approaches use an IR technique to create the baseline links and use experts' opinions to reevaluate baseline links. We show that using more sources of information improve the accuracy of IR techniques for requirements traceability. The achieved results in this dissertation show up to 22% precision, 7% recall improvement and 83% reduction in developer's effort for manually removing false-positive links. The results achieved in this dissertation are promising and we hope that further research in this field might improve the accuracy of IR techniques more

Collaborative traceability management: a multiple case study from the perspectives of organization, process, and culture

Traceability is crucial for many activities in software and systems engineering including monitoring the development progress, and proving compliance with standards. In practice, the use and maintenance of trace links are challenging as artifacts undergo constant change, and development takes place in distributed scenarios with multiple collaborating stakeholders. Although traceability management in general has been addressed in previous studies, there is a need for empirical insights into the collaborative aspects of traceability management and how it is situated in existing development contexts. The study reported in this paper aims to close this gap by investigating the relation of collaboration and traceability management, based on an understanding of characteristics of the development effort. In our multiple exploratory case study, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 24 individuals from 15 industrial projects. We explored which challenges arise, how traceability management can support collaboration, how collaboration relates to traceability management approaches, and what characteristics of the development effort influence traceability management and collaboration. We found that practitioners struggle with the following challenges: (1) collaboration across team and tool boundaries, (2) conveying the benefits of traceability, and (3) traceability maintenance. If these challenges are addressed, we found that traceability can facilitate communication and knowledge management in distributed contexts. Moreover, there exist multiple approaches to traceability management with diverse collaboration approaches, i.e., requirements-centered, developer-driven, and mixed approaches. While traceability can be leveraged in software development with both agile and plan-driven paradigms, a certain level of rigor is needed to realize its benefits and overcome challenges. To support practitioners, we provide principles of collaborative traceability management. The main contribution of this paper is empirical evidence of how culture, processes, and organization impact traceability management and collaboration, and principles to support practitioners with collaborative traceability management. We show that collaboration and traceability management have the potential to be mutually beneficial—when investing in one, also the other one is positively affected