Abstract
This chapter offers a vision for traceability in software and systems engineering and outlines eight challenges that need to be addressed in order to achieve it. One of these challenges is referred to as the grand challenge of traceability because making traceability ubiquitous in software and systems development (traceability challenge eight) demands progress with all seven other challenges. A model of a generic traceability process is used as a framework through which the goals and requirements of each challenge are expressed. For each requirement, the current status of the traceability research and practice is summarised, and areas of promise are highlighted. This systematic analysis is used to articulate eight major research themes for the traceability community, along with a number of underlying research topics and positive adoption practices for industry. This work is a snapshot of an ongoing and collaborative effort between traceability researchers and practitioners within the Center of Excellence for Software Traceability. It is intended to form a structured agenda for traceability research and practice, a basis for classifying research contributions and a means to track progress in the field.
This chapter is reproduced material from Center of Excellence for Software Traceability Technical Report #CoEST-2011-001, with permission. Please direct any feedback on this material via the CoEST website (http://www.coest.org).
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Notes
- 1.
Both of these accounts were provided first hand to one of the authors of this chapter.
- 2.
- 3.
Tracing without tears – with thanks to Dr. Robert Natelson for the Latin version of this motto (http://www.umt.edu/law/faculty/natelson.htm).
- 4.
Please note that this chapter is a result of community workshops and discussions; the objective is to highlight general points about the state of the art and the practice in traceability, not to provide an exhaustive set of references to projects and publications. The reader is referred to the website of the Center of Excellence for Software Traceability for such materials: http://www.coest.org.
- 5.
Expressing these requirements dependencies and determining priorities remain topics for future work (see Section 12).
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank all the participants of the two initial traceability workshops in which the initial grand challenges for traceability were explored (at NASA’s IV&V facility in the Summer of 2006, and in Lexington, Kentucky in the Spring of 2007). They would also like to thank NASA and the NSF for funding these original workshops (NASA grant number NNX06AD02G and NSF grant number 0647443).
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Gotel, O. et al. (2012). The Grand Challenge of Traceability (v1.0). In: Cleland-Huang, J., Gotel, O., Zisman, A. (eds) Software and Systems Traceability. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2239-5_16
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