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

Assessing Traceability of Software Engineering Artifacts

The generation of traceability links or traceability matrices is vital to many software engineering activities. It is also person-power intensive, time-consuming, error-prone, and lacks tool support. The activities that require traceability information include, but are not limited to, risk analysis, impact analysis, criticality assessment, test coverage analysis, and verification and validation of software systems. Information Retrieval (IR) techniques have been shown to assist with the automated generation of traceability links by reducing the time it takes to generate the traceability mapping. Researchers have applied techniques such as Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), vector space retrieval, and probabilistic IR and have enjoyed some success. This paper concentrates on examining issues not previously widely studied in the context of traceability: the importance of the vocabulary base used for tracing and the evaluation and assessment of traceability mappings and methods using secondary measures. We examine these areas and perform empirical studies to understand the importance of each to the traceability of software engineering artifacts

Traceability approach for conflict dissolution in handling requirements crosscutting

Requirements crosscutting in software development and maintenance has gradually become an important issue in software engineering. There are growing needs of traceability support to achieve some possible understanding in requirements crosscutting throughout phases in software lifecycle. It is aimed to manage practical process in addressing requirements crosscutting at various phases in order to comply with industrial standard. However, due to its distinct nature, many recent works are focusing on identification, modularization, composition and conflict dissolution of requirements crosscutting which are mostly saturated at requirements level. These works fail to practically specify crosscutting properties for functional and nonfunctional requirements at requirements, analysis and design phases. Therefore, this situation leads to inability to provide sufficient support for software engineers to manage requirements crosscutting across the remaining development phases. This thesis proposes a new approach called the Identification, Modularization, Design Composition Rules and Conflict Dissolutions (IM-DeCRuD) that provides a special traceability to facilitate better understanding and reasoning for engineering tasks towards requirements crosscutting during software development and evolution. This study also promotes a simple but significant way to support pragmatic changes of crosscutting properties at requirements, analysis and design phases for medium sizes of software development and maintenance projects. A tool was developed based on the proposed approach to support four main perspectives namely requirements specification definition, requirements specification modification, requirements prioritization setting and graphics visualizing representation. Software design components are generated using Generic Modeling Environment (GME) with Java language interpreter to incorporate all these features. The proposed IM-DeCRuD was applied to an industrial strength case study of medium-scaled system called myPolicy. The tool was evaluated and the results were verified by some experts for validation and opinion. The feedbacks were then gathered and analyzed using DESMET qualitative method. The outcomes show that the IM-DeCRuD is applicable to address some tedious job of engineering process in handling crosscutting properties at requirements, analysis and design phases for system development and evolution

Interaction-Based Creation and Maintenance of Continuously Usable Trace Links

Traceability is a major concern for all software engineering artefacts. The core of traceability are trace links between the artefacts. Out of the links between all kinds of artefacts, trace links between requirements and source code are fundamental, since they enable the connection between the user point of view of a requirement and its actual implementation. Trace links are important for many software engineering tasks such as maintenance, program comprehension, verification, etc. Furthermore, the direct availability of trace links during a project improves the performance of developers. The manual creation of trace links is too time-consuming to be practical. Thus, traceability research has a strong focus on automatic trace link creation. The most common automatic trace link creation methods use information retrieval techniques to measure the textual similarity between artefacts. The results of the textual similarity measurement is then used to judge the creation of links between artefacts. The application of such information retrieval techniques results in a lot of wrong link candidates and requires further expert knowledge to make the automatically created links usable, insomuch as it is necessary to manually vet the link candidates. This fact prevents the usage of information retrieval techniques to create trace links continuously and directly provide them to developers during a project. Thus, this thesis addresses the problem of continuously providing trace links of a good quality to developers during a project and to maintain these links along with changing artefacts. To achieve this, a novel automatic trace link creation approach called Interaction Log Recording-based Trace Link Creation (ILog) has been designed and evaluated. ILog utilizes the interactions of developers with source code while implementing requirements. In addition, ILog uses the common development convention to provide issues' identifiers in a commit message, to assign recorded interactions to requirements. Thus ILog avoids additional manual efforts from the developers for link creation. ILog has been implemented in a set of tools. The tools enable the recording of interactions in different integrated development environments and the subsequent creation of trace links. Trace link are created between source code files which have been touched by interactions and the current requirement which is being worked on. The trace links which are initially created in this way are further improved by utilizing interaction data such as interaction duration, frequency, type, etc. and source code structure, i.e. source code references between source code files involved in trace links. ILog's link improvement removes potentially wrong links and subsequently adds further correct links. ILog was evaluated in three empirical studies using gold standards created by experts. One of the studies used data from an open source project. In the two other studies, student projects involving a real world customer were used. The results of the studies showed that ILog can create trace links with perfect precision and good recall, which enables the direct usage of the links. The studies also showed that the ILog approach has better precision and recall than other automatic trace link creation approaches, such as information retrieval. To identify trace link maintenance capabilities suitable for the integration in ILog, a systematic literature review about trace link maintenance was performed. In the systematic literature review the trace link maintenance approaches which were found are discussed on the basis of a standardized trace link maintenance process. Furthermore, the extension of ILog with suitable trace link maintenance capabilities from the approaches found is illustrated

Establishing and Maintaining Semantically Rich Traceability: A Metamodelling Approach

This thesis addresses the problem of model-to-model traceability in Model Driven Engineering (MDE). A MDE process typically involves models ex- pressed in different modelling languages that capture different views of the system under development. To enhance automation, consistency and co- herency, establishing and maintaining semantically rich traceability links between models used throughout the software development lifecycle is of paramount importance. This thesis deals with the various challenges associated with providing traceability support in the context of MDE by defining a domain-specific, model-based traceability approach, which supports the main traceability ac- tivities in a rigorous and semi-automatic manner. To evaluate the validity of the thesis proposition, a reference implementation has been provided. The results obtained from the application of the proposed approach to various case-studies and examples have confirmed the feasibility and benefits of such an approach