The quest for Ubiquity: A roadmap for software and systems traceability research

Abstract

Traceability underlies many important software and systems engineering activities, such as change impact analysis and regression testing. Despite important research advances, as in the automated creation and maintenance of trace links, traceability implementation and use is still not pervasive in industry. A community of traceability researchers and practitioners has been collaborating to understand the hurdles to making traceability ubiquitous. Over a series of years, workshops have been held to elicit and enhance research challenges and related tasks to address these shortcomings. A continuing discussion of the community has resulted in the research roadmap of this paper. We present a brief view of the state of the art in traceability, the grand challenge for traceability and future directions for the field.