An end-to-end industrial software traceability tool

Abstract

Traceability is an important aspect of software development that is often required by various professional standards and government agencies. Yet current industrial approaches do not typically address end-to-end traceability.Moreover, many industry projects become entangled in process overhead and fail to derive much benefit from current traceability solutions. This paper presents a successful end-to-end software traceability tool developed at Wonderware, a software development company and a business unit of Invensys Systems, Inc. This process-oriented approach achieves comprehensive traceability and supports the entire software development life cycle by focusing on both requirements traceability and process traceability. We offer new perspectives in analyzing the problem as well as general traceability guidelines. These guidelines have emerged from the experience of implementing and deploying the traceability tool within actual company constraints. We discuss encouraging results and point to the advantages gained in using our approach.

Traceability-Why Do It?

“…This section provides an answer to RQ 1: What are the motivators for an organisation to implement traceability? Regulation: Traceability implementation is mandated in many software development standards as seen in [2,6,13,14,16,[19][20][21], and many industries, in particular the safety critical industries e.g. in the US the Federal Drugs Authority states that code must be linked to requirements and test cases.…”

Software traceability with topic modeling

“…Understand the limits of automation. As we have observed in previous work [8], it is important to distinguish between automatable traceability tasks and tasks that require human intervention. Thus, we aim to use automation techniques that minimize the manual tasks of artifact search and trace link post-analysis.…”

“…Both our previous work [8] and literature [21] suggest that performing traceability tasks should be a side effect to the users' development tasks in order to gain wide adoption. In addition, the traced information should provide direct benefits to the users.…”

“…Such techniques include embedding related artifact IDs into source code [34] and only automating peripheral traceability tasks, such as maintaining consistency between artifacts [8]. Tools like PRO-ART and TOORS support the online recording of links based on pre-specified user information.…”

“…Based on our experience with implementing a successful software traceability framework in an industrial setting [8] and our observations of traceability techniques within eScience [9], our approach is guided by the following general insights. Understand the limits of automation.…”