Software traceability: trends and future directions

TLDR

Software traceability, required by safety‑critical certifying bodies, is often implemented ad‑hoc, limiting its benefits, and recent research has advanced tooling, planning, semi‑automation, query languages, visualization, and domain applications. The paper aims to highlight the state‑of‑the‑art in software traceability and identify compelling research areas that require attention. The authors conduct a comprehensive review of existing research to synthesize current knowledge and propose future research directions.

Abstract

Software traceability is a sought-after, yet often elusive quality in software-intensive systems. Required in safety-critical systems by many certifying bodies, such as the USA Federal Aviation Authority, software traceability is an essential element of the software development process. In practice, traceability is often conducted in an ad-hoc, after-the-fact manner and, therefore, its benefits are not always fully realized. Over the past decade, researchers have focused on specific areas of the traceability problem, developing more sophisticated tooling, promoting strategic planning, applying information retrieval techniques capable of semi-automating the trace creation and maintenance process, developing new trace query languages and visualization techniques that use trace links, and applying traceability in specific domains such as Model Driven Development, product line systems, and agile project environments. In this paper, we build upon a prior body of work to highlight the state-of-the-art in software traceability, and to present compelling areas of research that need to be addressed.