Towards Integrated Variant Management in Global Software Engineering: An Experience Report

In the automotive domain, customer demands and market constraints are progressively realized by electric/ electronic components and corresponding software. Variant traceability in SPL is crucial in the context of different tasks, like change impact analysis, especially in complex global software projects. In addition, traceability concepts must be extended by partly automated variant configuration mechanisms to handle restrictions and dependencies between variants. Such variant configuration mechanism helps to reduce complexity when configuring a valid variant and to establish an explicit documentation of dependencies between components. However, integrated variant management has not been sufficiently addressed so far. Especially, the increasing number of software variants requires an examination of traceable and configurable software variants over the software lifecycle. This paper emphasizes variant traceability achievements in a large global software engineering project, elaborates existing challenges, and evaluates an industrial usage of an integrated variant management based on experiences

An investigation of requirements traceability practices in software companies in Malaysia

Requirement traceability (RT) is one of the critical activity of good requirements management and an important part of development projects. At the same time, it improves the quality of software products. Nevertheless, industrial practitioners are challenged by this lack of guidance or results which serve as a rule or guide in establishing effective traceability in their projects. The outcome of this is that practitioners are ill-informed as to the best or most efficient means of accomplishing their tasks, such as found in software companies. Notwithstanding the lack of guidance, there are a number of commonly accepted practices which can guide industrial practitioners with respect to trace the requirements in their projects. This study aims to determine the practices of RT through conducting a systematic literature review. Also, this study conducted a survey for investigating the use of RT practices in the software companies at northern region of Malaysia. Finally, a series of interviews with practitioners were carried out to know the reasons that influence on the use of these practices in software development. The findings showed that majority software companies do not use traceability practices for tracing requirements due to financial issues and the lack of knowledge of these practices. This study presented empirical evidence about the use of RT practices among software companies. Thus, the findings of this study can assist practitioners to select RT practices, and also enables researchers to find gaps and pointers for future study in this study domain

Benefits of traceability in software development

PhD ThesisFor an engineer to be able to modify successfully a complex computer-based system, he will need to understand the system's functionality. Traceability can help the engineer to gain that understanding, but several surveys have observed that traceability information is poorly recorded. This thesis argues, based on a survey of nine aerospace projects, that one of the main causes of poor recording is that Traceability does not directly benefit the development process. The recording of traceability information is best performed by the engineers directly involved in the development process, yet it is precisely these engineers who seem to obtain no direct benefit in performing this task. This can be summarised as the Traceability Benefit Problem. To overcome this problem the recording of traceability data must provide immediate, tangible benefits to the engineers involved in the current development process. A related problem that occurs in large multi-team projects that follow development processes based on predictive models (such as Waterfall or VModel) is the changing of interface documentation without adequate negotiation (referred to as Throwing the Problem over the Wall). This thesis describes, in detail, how a small automotive sensor project addressed these problems by developing a Requirements Traceability system that enabled the reuse of software and provided a basis for the negotiation of changes with their customer. Analysis of the lessons learnt from the automotive sensor and aerospace projects lead to the definition of the Traceable Development Contract. The contribution of this thesis is the description and discussion of the Traceable Development Contract, a method of coordinating the interaction of related development teams in development process that is based on a predictive development model. The Traceable Development Contract is proposed as a means of controlling the upstream team bias with respect to the imposition of changes, by employing traceability to provide a basis for the negotiation of change. By VI employing traceability in this way, it becomes beneficial to the development engineers and therefore overcomes the Traceability Benefit Problem. Finally, the thesis considers how the Traceable Development Contract traceability information can be exploited further to provide solution maturity and design metrics

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

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

Effective and efficient requirement traceability in the software development and Information Technology industry

Requirements traceability has been identified as a quality factor and a characteristic a system should possess and include as a non-functional requirement. Requirements engineering processes should always include methods and tools of maintaining traces and relationships between requirements and product artefacts. To investigate the extent to which requirements traceability is used in software and information technology projects, a theoretical model of requirements traceability was presented in this research. Five organizations were investigated through semi-structured interviews and their requirements tracing practices were compared with the theoretical model. The extent to which organizations apply requirements traceability practices in their projects differs and as a result they were categorised as inactive, dormant and active users in this research. The advent of agile development methods is one of the major factors affecting requirements traceability practices. Among other recommended areas of further research, there is need for future research to look at how agile development and traditional methods can be implemented together in requirement tracing practices

Why don’t we trace? A study on the barriers to software traceability in practice

Researchers have proposed numerous tools, methods, and techniques for establishing and maintaining software traceability. Despite its acknowledged importance, researchers argue that traceability is still “a sought-after, yet often elusive quality in software-intensive systems”. We have little evidence regarding how creating, managing, and using traceability links vary depending on factors such as organizational contexts, software development practices, and project types. We conduct an empirical study where software development practitioners express their perception regarding the value of software traceability. Via an online survey, 55 participants provided information related to their current traceability practices and needs. Furthermore, we interviewed 14 practitioners to gain a more in-depth understanding. Our study investigates the effect of two independent variables: the software development paradigm and the type of developed software system. Among the several identified findings, our analysis reveals that, although the traceability costs are an inhibitor for adopting more mature traceability practices, the respondents believe that the expected benefits still outweigh envisioned costs. Traceability is mainly performed manually: not only are automated trace retrieval tools scarce, but their offered automation is not expected to replace human involvement