Grand challenges, benchmarks, and TraceLab: developing infrastructure for the software traceability research community

The challenges of implementing successful and cost-effective traceability have created a compelling research agenda that has addressed a broad range of traceability related issues, ranging from qualitative studies of traceability users in industry to very technical and quantitative studies. Unfortunately, advances are hampered by the significant time and effort needed to establish a traceability research environment and to perform comparative evaluations of new results against existing baselines. In this panel we discuss ongoing efforts by members of the Center of Excellence for Software Traceability (CoEST) to define the Grand Challenges of Traceability, develop benchmarks, and to construct TraceLab, an extensible and scalable visual environment for designing and executing a broad range of traceability experiments.