The Need for Traceability in Heterogeneous Systems: A Systematic Literature Review

Traceability provides a mean for Software Engineers to track system artifacts at different levels of abstraction to verify and validate system requirements. This paper provides a systematic literature review about modeling traceability in computer systems, particularly, systems that involve artifacts that come from different domains of expertise (i.e., heterogeneous artifacts). Our findings show that there is a lack of research that focus on modeling traceability among heterogeneous artifacts, which reflects in inadequate traceability tools, and that precise semantics for trace links among artifacts is needed. Our findings lead us to highlight the key areas that can enhance research on those directions.