2,887 research outputs found
<i>Trace++</i>: A Traceability Approach for Agile Software Engineering
Agile methodologies have been introduced as an alternative to traditional software engineering methodologies. However, despite the advantages of using agile methodologies, the transition between traditional and agile methodologies is not an easy task. There are several problems associated with the use of agile methodologies. Examples of these problems are related to (i) lack of metrics to measure the amount of rework that occurs per sprint, (ii) interruption of a project after several iterations, (iii) changes in the requirements, (iv) lack of documentation, and (v) lack of management control. In this paper we present Trace++, a traceability technique that extends traditional traceability relationships with extra information in order to support the transition between traditional and agile software development. The use of Trace++ has been evaluated in two real projects of different software development companies to measure the benefits of using Trace++ to support agile software development
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
A diversity-based approach to requirements tracing in new product development.
Production models emerged in recent times have stressed the need to face complex production contexts, characterized in particular by the rise in internal and environmental variability. In this work, a stylization of some elements concerning analysis and design of new products is given, and in particular those that involve definition and transfer phases in the development of innovative goods, where change and variability in requirements along development process are often high. This analysis has a twofold goal: first, to supply a conceptual frame for the close examination of some dynamics of requirement's integration into an artifact's design, in order to give account of their variability along development cycle; on the other side, to propose an approach based on simple similarity metrics, to be applied to linguistic descriptions of artifacts in the early phases of development process, in order to identify components in an artifact that undergo larger variability and therefore are to be paid more attention in the subsequent phases of life cycle.
A Systematic Review of Tracing Solutions in Software Product Lines
Software Product Lines are large-scale, multi-unit systems that enable
massive, customized production. They consist of a base of reusable artifacts
and points of variation that provide the system with flexibility, allowing
generating customized products. However, maintaining a system with such
complexity and flexibility could be error prone and time consuming. Indeed, any
modification (addition, deletion or update) at the level of a product or an
artifact would impact other elements. It would therefore be interesting to
adopt an efficient and organized traceability solution to maintain the Software
Product Line. Still, traceability is not systematically implemented. It is
usually set up for specific constraints (e.g. certification requirements), but
abandoned in other situations. In order to draw a picture of the actual
conditions of traceability solutions in Software Product Lines context, we
decided to address a literature review. This review as well as its findings is
detailed in the present article.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures, 7 table
Software Engineers' Information Seeking Behavior in Change Impact Analysis - An Interview Study
Software engineers working in large projects must navigate complex
information landscapes. Change Impact Analysis (CIA) is a task that relies on
engineers' successful information seeking in databases storing, e.g., source
code, requirements, design descriptions, and test case specifications. Several
previous approaches to support information seeking are task-specific, thus
understanding engineers' seeking behavior in specific tasks is fundamental. We
present an industrial case study on how engineers seek information in CIA, with
a particular focus on traceability and development artifacts that are not
source code. We show that engineers have different information seeking
behavior, and that some do not consider traceability particularly useful when
conducting CIA. Furthermore, we observe a tendency for engineers to prefer less
rigid types of support rather than formal approaches, i.e., engineers value
support that allows flexibility in how to practically conduct CIA. Finally, due
to diverse information seeking behavior, we argue that future CIA support
should embrace individual preferences to identify change impact by empowering
several seeking alternatives, including searching, browsing, and tracing.Comment: Accepted for publication in the proceedings of the 25th International
Conference on Program Comprehensio
Toward Visualization and Analysis of Traceability Relationships in Distributed and Offshore Software Development Projects
Offshore software development projects provoke new issues to the collaborative endeavor of software development due to their global distribution and involvement of various people, processes, and tools. These problems relate to the geographical distance and the associated time-zone differences; cultural, organizational, and process issues; as well as language problems. However, existing tool support is neither adequate nor grounded in empirical observations. This paper presents two empirical studies of global software development teams and their usage of tools. The results are then used to motivate and inform the construction of more useful software development tools. The focus is on issues that are tool-related but have not yet been solved by existing tools. The two software tools presented as solutions, Ariadne and TraVis, explicitly address yet unresolved issues in global software development and also integrate with prevalent other solutions
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