Answering the requirements traceability questions

To understand requirements traceability in practice, we present a preliminary study of identifying questions from requirements repositories and examining their answering status. Investigating four open-source projects results in 733 requirements questions, among which 43% were answered successfully, 35% were answered unsuccessfully, and 22% were not answered at all. We evaluate the accuracy of using a state-of-the-art natural language processing tool to identify the requirements questions and illuminate automated ways to classify their answering status.