Towards a requirements traceability process centered on the traceability model

Abstract

Requirements traceability (RT) has been acknowledged as a valuable activity in the software development process. Its importance is reflected in different quality standards, which dictates that requirements should be traceable through the software development life-cycle. However, there is not a consensus about the traceability process and, as a consequence, RT practices cannot be unified across different organizational settings. Identifying common aspects to the RT process has been recognized as one of the grand challenges of RT. Even though, researches regarding improvements in requirements engineering (RE) neglect the traceability research scope. Therefore, is this paper, we propose and detail a RT process, specifying its workflow, actors, responsibilities and inputs/outputs as well as establishing contracts that govern the proposed process phases. To evaluate the proposed process, we have conducted an empirical experiment in a real project under development for the federal police of Brazil. We observed time, precision, recall and efficiency metrics and concluded that the proposed process improves the performance of RT practices. As a final remark, the proposed process contributes towards the discussion of common aspects of the RT process.