Integrating Traceability Within the IDE to Prevent Requirements Documentation Debt

Documentation issues in software projects have been recently classified as a type of technical debt (TD), a concept that express-es how shortcuts during software development result in additional maintenance and evolution effort. The specific type of TD is termed documentation debt, and is among the most prevalent ones in practice and research. In this study we propose a tool-based approach for preventing documentation TD during requirements engineering, by: (a) integrating requirements specifications into the IDE, and (b) enabling the real-time creation of traces between requirements and code. To this end, we collaborated with a small/medium software company and conducted a qualitative case study to: (a) analyze the current process and identify existing TD types, (b) collect the requirements and implement a tool that aims at preventing the accumulation of documentation TD, and (c) investigate whether the tool successfully meets its goal. The results of the study suggest that the developers are motivated to use the developed tool, since they feel that they can develop, maintain and utilize requirements specifications and traces as part of their daily routine.