Special Issue: Software Traceability; Guest Editors: George Spanoudakis and Andrea ZismanNo Access

SUPPORTING SOFTWARE UNDERSTANDING WITH AUTOMATED REQUIREMENTS TRACEABILITY

ALEXANDER EGYED

Teknowledge Corporation, 4640 Admiralty Way, Suite 1010, Marina Del Rey, CA 90292, USA

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and

PAUL GRÜNBACHER

Systems Engineering and Automation, Johannes Kepler University, 4040 Linz, Austria

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https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218194005002464Cited by:40 (Source: Crossref)

Abstract

Requirements traceability (RT) aims at defining and utilizing relationships between stakeholder requirements and artifacts produced during the software development life-cycle and provides an important means to foster software understanding. Although techniques for generating and validating traceability information are available, RT in practice often suffers from the enormous effort and complexity of creating and maintaining traces. This results in invalid or incomplete trace information which cannot support engineers in real-world problems. In this paper we present a tool-supported approach that requires the designer to specify some trace dependencies but eases trace acquisition by generating others automatically. We illustrate the approach using a video-on-demand system and show how the generated traces can be used in various engineering scenarios to improve software understanding. In a case study using an open source software application we demonstrate that the approach is capable of dealing with large-scale systems and delivers valid results.

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