Mäder, Patrick

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   TU Ilmenau | Universitätsbibliothek | ilmedia, 2020 http://www.tu-ilmenau.de/ilmedia  Mäder, Patrick: The benefits of traceability during software implementation DOI: 10.22032/dbt.42351 URN: urn:nbn:de:gbv:ilm1-2020200337  Original published in: Software and systems traceability for safety-critical projects : report from Dagstuhl Seminar 15162 / Cleland-Huang, Jane; Rayadurgam, Sanjai; Mäder, Patrick; Schäfer, Wilhelm. - Wadern : Schloss Dagstuhl. - 5 (2015), 4, p. 85-86. (Dagstuhl Reports : Dokumentationen zu Dagstuhl-Seminaren und Dagstuhl-Perspektiven-Workshops / Schloss Dagstuhl, Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik. - Wadern : Schloss Dagstuhl. - 5 (2015), 4, p. 76-97. -  DOI: 10.4230/DagRep.5.4.76) ISSN: 2192-5283 Original published: 2015-12-21 [Visited: 2020-03-12]     This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. To view a copy of this license, visit  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/  Jane Cleland-Huang, Sanjai Rayadurgam, Patrick Mäder, and Wilhelm Schäfer 853.8 The Benefits of Traceability During Software ImplementationPatrick Maeder (TU Ilmenau, DE)License Creative Commons BY 3.0 Unported license© Patrick MaederJoint work of Maeder, Patrick; Egyed, AlexanderMain reference P. Mäder, A. Egyed, “Do developers benefit from requirements traceability when evolving andmaintaining a software system?”, Empirical Software Engineering, 20(2):413–441, 2015.URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10664-014-9314-zSoftware traceability is a required component of many software development processes.Advocates of software traceability cite advantages like easier program comprehension and1516286 15162 – Software and Systems Traceability for Safety-Critical Projectssupport for software maintenance (i.e., software change). However, despite its growingpopularity, for a long time there existed no published evaluation about the usefulness ofrequirements traceability. It is important, if not crucial, to investigate whether the use ofrequirements traceability can significantly support development tasks to eventually justify itscosts [3, 1, 4, 5]. We thus conducted a controlled experiment with 71 subjects re-performingreal implementation tasks on two third-party development projects: half of the tasks withand the other half without traceability. Our findings show that subjects with traceabilityperformed on average 24% faster on a given task and created on average 50% more correctsolutions [2, 6] – suggesting that traceability not only saves effort but can profoundly improvesoftware implementation quality. For a follow-up study [7], we selected medium to large-scaleopen-source projects and focused especially on the discovered effect for implementationquality. We quantified for each developed component of each software project, the degreeto which a studied development activity was enabled by existing traceability and set thismetric in relation to the number of defects that occurred in a component. We found thattraceability significantly affects the defect rate in a component. Overall, our results providefor the first time empirical evidence that traceability significantly improves implementationspeed as well as implementation quality during software development.References1 P. Mäder, O. Gotel, and I. Philippow (2009). “Motivation matters in the traceabilitytrenches”, In: Proc. of RE’09, pp. 143–148.2 P. Mäder and A. Egyed (2012). “Assessing the effect of requirements traceability for softwaremaintenance”, In: Proc. of ICSM’12, pp. 171–180.3 E. Bouillon, P. Mäder, I. Philippow (2013). “A Survey on Usage Scenarios for RequirementsTraceability in Practice”, In: Proc. of REFSQ’13, pp. 158–173.4 P. Rempel, P. Mäder, and T. Kuschke (2013). “An empirical study on project-specifictraceability strategies”, In: Proc. of RE’13, 195–204.5 P. Rempel, P. Mäder, T. Kuschke, and I. Philippow (2013). “Requirements Traceabilityacross Organizational Boundaries – A Survey and Taxonomy”, In: Proc. of REFSQ’13,pp. 125–140.6 P. Mäder and A. Egyed (2015). “Do developers benefit from requirements traceability whenevolving and maintaining a software system?”, In: Empirical Software Engineering, 20(2),pp. 413–441.7 P. Rempel and P. Mäder (2015). “Estimating the Implementation Risk of Requirements inAgile Software Development Projects with Traceability Metrics”, In: Proc. of REFSQ’15,pp. 81–97.

The   benefits of traceability during software implementation

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The benefits of traceability during software implementation

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