31,645 research outputs found
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
Why and How Your Traceability Should Evolve: Insights from an Automotive Supplier
Traceability is a key enabler of various activities in automotive software
and systems engineering and required by several standards. However, most
existing traceability management approaches do not consider that traceability
is situated in constantly changing development contexts involving multiple
stakeholders. Together with an automotive supplier, we analyzed how technology,
business, and organizational factors raise the need for flexible traceability.
We present how traceability can be evolved in the development lifecycle, from
early elicitation of traceability needs to the implementation of mature
traceability strategies. Moreover, we shed light on how traceability can be
managed flexibly within an agile team and more formally when crossing team
borders and organizational borders. Based on these insights, we present
requirements for flexible tool solutions, supporting varying levels of data
quality, change propagation, versioning, and organizational traceability.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, accepted in IEEE Softwar
Software and systems traceability for safety-critical projects: report from Dagstuhl Seminar 15162
This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 15162 on “Software and Systems Traceability for Safety-Critical Projects”. The event brought together researchers and industrial practitioners working in the field of safety critical software to explore the needs, challenges, and solutions for Software and Systems Traceability in this domain. The goal was to explore the gap between the traceability prescribed by guidelines and that delivered by manufacturers, and starting from a clean slate, to clearly articulate traceability needs for safety-critical software systems, to identify challenges, explore solutions, and to propose a set of principles and
domain-specific exemplars for achieving traceability in safety critical systems
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
An analysis of the requirements traceability problem
In this paper1, we investigate and discuss the underlying nature
of the requirements traceability problem. Our work is based on
empirical studies, involving over 100 practitioners, and an
evaluation of current support. We introduce the distinction
between pre-requirements specification (pre-RS) traceability
and post-requirements specification (post-RS) traceability, to
demonstrate why an all-encompassing solution to the problem is
unlikely, and to provide a framework through which to
understand its multifaceted nature. We report how the majority
of the problems attributed to poor requirements traceability are
due to inadequate pre-RS traceability and show the fundamental
need for improvements here. In the remainder of the paper, we
present an analysis of the main barriers confronting such
improvements in practice, identify relevant areas in which
advances have been (or can be) made, and make
recommendations for research
Dynamically typed languages
Dynamically typed languages such as Python and Ruby have experienced a rapid grown in popularity in recent times. However, there is much confusion as to what makes these languages interesting relative to statically typed languages, and little knowledge of their rich history. In this chapter I explore the general topic of dynamically typed languages, how they differ from statically typed languages, their history, and their defining features
Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India
The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India
- …