Traceability-Based Change Awareness

Helming, Jonas; Koegel, Maximilian; Naughton, Helmut; David, Joern; Shterev, Aleksandar

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-04425-0_28

Cited by 12 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…With respect to tooling, Figueiredo et al [14] describe a tool that facilitates collaboration in a distributed setting by identifying developers affected by a change via trace links. Helming et al [21] present a tool that also uses trace links to notify users of changes; this technique is able to generate a lower number of relevant notifications compared to standard notification techniques by leveraging modifier, creator, and assign information. Strašunskas [56] discusses traceability in collaborative development environments with a strong focus on technical aspects such as how to version and store artifacts (including trace links).…”

Section: Collaborative Traceability Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As the suggested change notification feature ensures that responsible stakeholders are informed about relevant changes, it could actually improve and simplify collaboration. Helming et al [21] suggested a model-based change awareness approach, identifying which users to notify based on trace links. This was evaluated in a case study and found to be indeed useful in practice.…”

Section: Creating Trace Links To Receive Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Collaborative traceability management: a multiple case study from the perspectives of organization, process, and culture

et al. 2018

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Traceability is crucial for many activities in software and systems engineering including monitoring the development progress, and proving compliance with standards. In practice, the use and maintenance of trace links are challenging as artifacts undergo constant change, and development takes place in distributed scenarios with multiple collaborating stakeholders. Although traceability management in general has been addressed in previous studies, there is a need for empirical insights into the collaborative aspects of traceability management and how it is situated in existing development contexts. The study reported in this paper aims to close this gap by investigating the relation of collaboration and traceability management, based on an understanding of characteristics of the development effort. In our multiple exploratory case study, we conducted semistructured interviews with 24 individuals from 15 industrial projects. We explored which challenges arise, how traceability management can support collaboration, how collaboration relates to traceability management approaches, and what characteristics of the development effort influence traceability management and collaboration. We found that practitioners struggle with the following challenges: (1) collaboration across team and tool boundaries, (2) conveying the benefits of traceability, and (3) traceability maintenance. If these challenges are addressed, we found that traceability can facilitate communication and knowledge management in distributed contexts. Moreover, there exist multiple approaches to traceability management with diverse collaboration approaches, i.e., requirements-centered, developer-driven, and mixed approaches. While traceability can be leveraged in software development with both agile and plan-driven paradigms, a certain level of rigor is needed to realize its benefits and overcome challenges. To support practitioners, we provide principles of collaborative traceability management. The main contribution of this paper is empirical evidence of how culture, processes, and organization impact traceability management and collaboration, and principles to support practitioners with collaborative traceability management. We show that collaboration and traceability management have the potential to be mutually beneficial-when investing in one, also the other one is positively affected.

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Section: Collaborative Traceability Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Creating Trace Links To Receive Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Collaborative traceability management: a multiple case study from the perspectives of organization, process, and culture

et al. 2018

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“…Furthermore the system notifies developers about changes on related system model elements. This notification strategy has been shown to produce valuable results [5].…”

Section: Executing Iterationsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Managing iterations with UNICASE

Helming

Koegel

2010

Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 2

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“…Demuth et al [22] conducted a study on how to use traceability for systems engineering to facilitate change notification and consistency checking of artifacts. [40] describe tools for facilitating collaboration in a distributed environment or notifying users about changes.…”

Section: Quality Assurance and Traceability Management Solutions In Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

The impact of requirements on systems development speed: a multiple-case study in automotive

et al. 2019

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Automotive manufacturers have historically adopted rigid requirements engineering processes. This allowed them to meet safety-critical requirements when producing a highly complex and differentiated product out of the integration of thousands of physical and software components. Nowadays, few software-related domains are as rapidly changing as the automotive industry. In particular, the needs of improving development speed are increasingly pushing companies in this domain toward new ways of developing software. In this paper, we investigate how the goal to increase development speed impacts how requirements are managed in the automotive domain. We start from a manager perspective, which we then complement with a more general perspective. We used a qualitative multiple-case study, organized in two steps. In the first step, we had 20 semi-structured interviews, at two automotive manufacturers. Our sampling strategy focuses on manager roles, complemented with technical specialists. In the second step, we validated our results with 12 more interviews, covering nine additional respondents and three recurring from the first step. In addition to validating our qualitative model, the second step of interviews broadens our perspective with technical experts and change managers. Our respondents indicate and rank six aspects of the current requirements engineering approach that impact development speed. These aspects include the negative impact of a requirements style dominated by safety concerns as well as decomposition of requirements over many levels of abstraction. Furthermore, the use of requirements as part of legal contracts with suppliers is seen as hindering fast collaboration. Six additional suggestions for potential improvements include domain-specific tooling, model-based requirements, test automation, and a combination of lightweight upfront requirements engineering preceding development with precise specifications post-development. Out of these 12 aspects, seven can likely be addressed as part of an ongoing agile transformation. We offer an empirical account of expectations and needs for new requirements engineering approaches in the automotive domain, necessary to coordinate hundreds of collaborating organizations developing software-intensive and potentially safety-critical systems.

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Traceability-Based Change Awareness

Cited by 12 publications

References 11 publications

Collaborative traceability management: a multiple case study from the perspectives of organization, process, and culture

Collaborative traceability management: a multiple case study from the perspectives of organization, process, and culture

Managing iterations with UNICASE

The impact of requirements on systems development speed: a multiple-case study in automotive

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