Research--best Practices For Automated Trace Ability

Jane Cleland-Huang, Raffaella Settimi, Eli Romanova, Brian Berenbach, Stephen Clark

Traceability 

Why traceability is a big issue Standards Require it ○ Sarbanes-Oxley Act ○ IEEE Std 830-1998- “SRS must be traceable”



Traditionally… Stored in spread sheets, text files or RM

software Ad hoc, inconsistent and incomplete Tend to deteriorate as time pressure increases Thus need for automated solution

Best Practices—Traceability Environment 

Trace for a purpose Can import legacy documents but best is when

stakeholders identify

 Define

a suitable trace granularity

i.e. for UML class diagram generate a trace at

package, class, or method level Alexander Egyerd et. al. evaluated economic value of low level tracing Tenfold increase of granularity led to a two fold improvement of precision

Best Practices—Traceability Environment (cont.) 

In-Place Traceability to third party tools Developers use wide varieties of third party

tools Traceability should be provided within their native environment Use of APIs to retrieve the traceable data and transform it to a standard format Problem: proprietary tools make this difficult

Creating Traceable Artifacts 

Environment is only one part of the equation... Also need well written requirements  Use a well-defined project Glossary Defined during initial discovery with

stakeholders Consistency throughout the project is the key Can improve automated traceability by giving more weight to terms in glossary 

Write quality requirements Correct, unambiguous, complete etc. Really is a “best practice” in general

Creating Traceable Artifacts (cont) 

Construct a meaningful hierarchy Headings within documents and meaningful

package names enable construction of accurate links



Bridge Intra-domain Semantic gap Various Groups all generating content that

stretches across several domains Define intradomain synonyms Avoid reuse of terms across domains if they mean different things for each domain. This generates un-necessary links and decreases the precision of the results

Creating Traceable Artifacts (cont)

Introducing Automated Trace Processes  Requires

a “planned process improvement initiative”  Training can help improve results