Traceability patterns: an approach to requirement-component traceability in agile software development

Abstract

Requirements traceability, regardless of the process used to produce a software system, is an important quality attribute for the resulting software product. However, existing approaches to achieving requirements traceability have been specifically designed for traditional software development with formal requirements processes. With the wide industry adoption of agile development methodologies, where requirements are captured and communicated through informal channels, the applicability of existing traceability approaches to agile software projects has been restricted. In this paper, we introduce traceability patterns as a solution to requirement-component tractability in agile software development. In our approach, we achieve traceability through source code, which is the main development artifact in agile methodologies.