Despite the high relevance of traceability in software processes, the activities of traceability creation and management are not always adequately supported in practice. The lack of integration between the tools adopted in the development processes is one of the main causes of such an ineffective management, where traceability relationships are still manually generated and maintained. In this paper we present an industrial experience we performed for improving the traceability management in a testing process performed in the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles company. In this context, we carried out a process for analyzing and identifying the main issues due to the ineffective traceability management and proposed a solution for addressing them.We designed and implemented a software architecture for integrating the existing application lifecycle management platform with the tools used in the process with the aim of automating the process execution and the traceability links management. The new architecture was validated by a case study that showed how the integration solution produced beneficial effects on quality attributes of the testing process. KEYWORDS automotive, industrial case study, software process improvement, tool integration, traceability management 1 INTRODUCTION Requirement traceability was defined by Gotel et al, 1 as the ability to describe and follow the life of a requirement, in both forward and backward directions.It is realized in practice by establishing relationships, usually defined trace links, between the requirements and one or more artifacts of the system. 2 Since then, this definition was extended, and nowadays, we talk more in general about software traceability for indicating the creation and the use of links (or connections) between different kinds of software artifacts such as requirements, models, source code, test cases, or test results. These connections are called trace links and connect in a bidirectional way a source artifact to a target artifact. The research community is devoting great efforts for addressing the topic of the traceability management that is the planning, the organization, and the coordination of all the activities related to traceability, including the creation, maintenance, and use of trace links. 3 Moreover, both software development standards and process assessment frameworks, such as ISO/IEC 15504, automotive SPICE, capability maturity model integration (CMMI), ISO 26262, and IEC 61508, suggest the companies to adopt traceability management solutions to guarantee Abbreviations: ALM, application lifecycle management; API, application programming interface; DSML, domain-specific modeling language; ECU, electronic control unit; FCA, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles; GUI, graphical user interface; ITL, incorrect traceability links; ITLRP, incorrect traceability links reduction percentage; MIL, model in the loop; MTL, missing traceability links; MTLRP, missing traceability links reduction percentage; RQ, research question; SP, speedup percentage; SPEM, software and system pr...

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