Towards practical software traceability

Abstract

The importance of software traceability to software development is recognized by researchers and practitioners; yet, current approaches fall short of providing effective traceability in practice. An analysis of reported difficulties with traceability reveals that interacting factors from the economic, technical, and social perspectives hinder traceability. Motivated by the multi-faceted traceability problem, we combine architecture-centric stakeholder-driven traceability with open hypermedia, and we use insights from e-Science to guide our approach. We highlight expected contributions and discuss evaluation plans. Finally, we distinguish our approach from related research and technologies.