Continuously delivered? Periodically updated? Never changed? Studying an open source project's releases of code, requirements, and trace matrix

Many open source software projects deliver code continuously. How are the project's requirements updated? What about the traceability information of those requirements? To answer these questions, this paper reports our initial analyses of the iTrust medical care project's all publicly accessible releases. The results show that, as iTrust releases two versions per year, the code growth is smooth but the requirements growth experiences periodic mass updates. The asynchronous evolving paces cause the RTM stagnant, outdated, and inaccurate. Our work provides concrete insights into what updates should be applied to the requirements and the RTM in the face of the code changes, and illustrates the need for new ways to automatically keep requirements in sync over continuous release cycles.