Tracing Requirements and Source Code during Software Development: An Empirical Study

Abstract

[Context and motivation] In practice, trace ability links between requirements and code are often not created, because this would require increased development effort. To address this weakness, we developed in previous work an approach that semi-automatically captures trace ability links between requirements and code during development. We do this by using work items from project management that typically are stored in issue trackers. [Question/problem] Practitioners and researchers have discussed the practice of using work items to capture links between requirements and code, but there has been no systematic study of this practice. [Principal ideas/results] In this paper, we present such an empirical study based on the application of our approach. We applied our approach in three different software development projects conducted with undergraduate students. We evaluated the feasibility and practicability of our approach and its tool support. The feasibility results indicate that our approach creates correct trace ability links between all artifacts with high precision and recall during development. At the same time the practicability results indicate that the subjects found our approach and its tool support easy to use. [Contribution] The empirical evaluation in this paper contributes valuable insights into the tracing of requirements and code during software development.