Traceability maintenance: Factors and guidelines

Traceability is an important concern for numerous software engineering activities. Establishing traceability links is a challenging and cost-intensive task, which is uneconomical without suitable strategies for maintaining high link quality. Current approaches to Traceability Management (TM), however, often make important assumptions and choices without ensuring that the consequences and implications for trace-ability maintenance are feasible and desirable in practice. In this paper, therefore, we identify a set of core factors that influence how the quality of traceability links can be maintained. For each factor, we discuss relevant challenges and provide guidelines on how best to ensure viable traceability maintenance in a practical TM approach. Our guidelines are meant to be used by tool developers and users to select the most appropriate TM approach for their needs. Our results are based on and supported by data collected from interviews conducted with: (i) 9 of our industrial and academic project partners to elicit requirements for a TM tool, and (ii) 24 software development stakeholders from 15 industrial cases to provide a broader overview of the current state of the practice on TM. To evaluate the feasibility of our guidelines, we investigate a set of existing TM approaches used in industry with respect to our guidelines.