Visual Support In Automated Tracing

Automated traceability facilitates the dynamic generation of candidate links between requirements and other software artifacts. It provides an alternative option to the arduous and error-prone process of manually creating and maintaining a trace matrix. However the result set contains both true and false links which must therefore be evaluated by an analyst. Current approaches display the candidate links to the user in a relatively bland textual format. This position paper proposes several visualization techniques for helping analysts to evaluate sets of candidate links. The techniques are illustrated using examples from the Ice Breaker System.