Software traceability: trends and future directions

By Jane Cleland-Huang, O. Gotel, Jane Huffman Hayes, Patrick Mäder, A. Zisman. FOSE, 2014

358 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Software traceability is a sought-after, yet often elusive quality in software-intensive systems. Required in safety-critical systems by many certifying bodies, such as the USA Federal Aviation Authority, software traceability is an essential element of the software development process. In practice, traceability is often conducted in an ad-hoc, after-the-fact manner and, therefore, its benefits are not always fully realized. Over the past decade, researchers have focused on specific areas of the traceability problem, developing more sophisticated tooling, promoting strategic planning, applying information retrieval techniques capable of semi-automating the trace creation and maintenance process, developing new trace query languages and visualization techniques that use trace links, and applying traceability in specific domains such as Model Driven Development, product line systems, and agile project environments. In this paper, we build upon a prior body of work to highlight the state-of-the-art in software traceability, and to present compelling areas of research that need to be addressed.

Subfields: Information Systems, Software

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/15c388f628f04f90c407ba56f8f2e5affeffb82d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Information Systems

1. Jane Cleland-Huang
2. Jin L.C. Guo
3. Jinghui Cheng
4. Patrick Mäder
5. Artur Andrzejak
6. Lutz Büch

In Software

1. Jane Cleland-Huang
2. Jin L.C. Guo
3. Jinghui Cheng

Citations in the corpus

• Semantically Enhanced Software Traceability Using Deep Learning Techniques (2017, background): “Unfortunately, the tracing task is arduous to perform and error-prone [46], even when industrial tools are used to manually create links or to capture them as a byproduct of the development process [14].”
• Mind the gap: assessing the conformance of software traceability to relevant guidelines (2014, methodology): “In practice, traceability is achieved through the creation and use of trace links, defined by the Center of Excellence for Software and Systems Traceability (CoEST) as“specified associations between a pair of artifacts, one comprising the source artifact and one comprising the target artifact” [26, ”