Improving after-the-fact tracing and mapping: supporting software quality predictions

The software engineering industry undertakes many activities that require generating and using mappings. Companies develop knowledge bases to capture corporate expertise and possibly proprietary information. Software developers build traceability matrices to demonstrate that their designs satisfy the requirements. Proposal managers map customers' statements of work to individual sections of companies' proposals to prove compliance. Systems engineers authoring interface specifications record design rationales as they make relevant decisions. We developed an approach to tracing and mapping that aims to use fully automated information retrieval techniques, and we implemented our approach in a tool called RETRO (requirements tracing on target).