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Do developers benefit from requirements traceability when evolving and maintaining a software system?

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Abstract

Software traceability is a required component of many software development processes. Advocates of requirements traceability cite advantages like easier program comprehension and support for software maintenance (i.e., software change). However, despite its growing popularity, there exists no published evaluation about the usefulness of requirements traceability. It is important, if not crucial, to investigate whether the use of requirements traceability can significantly support development tasks to eventually justify its costs. We thus conducted a controlled experiment with 71 subjects re-performing real maintenance tasks on two third-party development projects: half of the tasks with and the other half without traceability. Subjects sketched their task solutions on paper to focus on the their ability to solving the problems rather than their programming skills. Our findings show that subjects with traceability performed on average 24 % faster on a given task and created on average 50 % more correct solutions—suggesting that traceability not only saves effort but can profoundly improve software maintenance quality.

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Notes

  1. The U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) contains a privacy rule, which regulates the use and disclosure of Protected Health Information (PHI). PHI is any information held by a covered entity, which concerns health status, provision of health care, or payment for health care that can be linked to an individual (HIPPA 1996).

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all participants for their dedicated work and the developers of Gantt and iTrust for making their work publicly available. This work was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) M1268-N23, P23115-N23, the German Research Foundation (DFG) Ph49/8-1, and the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) 16V0116.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Software Systems/Process Informatics Group, Technische Universität Ilmenau, Ilmenau, Germany

    Patrick Mäder

  2. Institute for Software Systems Engineering (ISSE), Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria

    Alexander Egyed

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  1. Patrick Mäder
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  2. Alexander Egyed
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Correspondence to Patrick Mäder.

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Communicated by: Massimiliano Di Penta and Jonathan Maletic

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Mäder, P., Egyed, A. Do developers benefit from requirements traceability when evolving and maintaining a software system?. Empir Software Eng 20, 413–441 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-014-9314-z

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