Helping analysts trace requirements: an objective look

This work addresses the issues related to improving the overall quality of the requirements tracing process for independent verification and validation analysts. The contribution of the paper is three-fold: we define requirements for a tracing tool based on analyst responsibilities in the tracing process; we introduce several measures for validating that the requirements have been satisfied; and we present a prototype tool that we built, RETRO (REquirements TRacing On-target), to address these requirements. We also present the results of a study used to assess RETRO's support of requirements and requirement elements that can be measured objectively.