The Impact of Visualizing Traceability Links for Evolving Requirements in Software Maintenance– A Controlled Experiment

Abstract

Traceability Management plays a key role in tracing the artefacts associated with every requirement during the life cycle of a software project. However, the trace links between artefacts are not updated as the system evolves during the maintenance phase. This often leads to untrustworthy documentation and information gets scattered across a pile of untraceable documents that were created for various change management tasks. The goal of our research is on identifying an approach to trace requirements evolution across change requests and establish trace links between artifacts for such evolving requirements in the software maintenance phase. We have implemented a prototype Traceability Visualization Tool -VTrace for tracing requirements evolution. This tool also supports the visualization of trace links for evolving requirements. The effectiveness of the tool on change management tasks was tested using a controlled experiment. The results of our controlled experiment show that subjects who used the tool were 21% more accurate on change management tasks than subjects that didn't use the tool. This study provides us with the evidence that tracing the evolution of software artefacts is highly significant for better system maintenance by novice engineers.

A visual framework for software requirements traceability

“…Traceability techniques ISSN: 2302-9285  such as graphs, matrix, and hyperlinks are used to show complex data [11]. A graph-based visualization is the most common visualization technique used by traceability systems [12], [13]. It supports the visualization of an overview of traceability links between multiple requirements and artefacts as nodes, with relationships as edges.…”