Abstract
Traceability Management plays a key role in tracing the life of a requirement through all the specifications produced during the development phase of a software project. A lack of traceability information not only hinders the understanding of the system but also will prove to be a bottleneck in the future maintenance of the system. Projects that maintain traceability information during the development stages somehow fail to upgrade their artefacts or maintain traceability among the different versions of the artefacts that are produced during the maintenance phase. As a result the software artefacts lose the trustworthiness and engineers mostly work from the source code for impact analysis. The goal of our research is on understanding the impact of visualizing traceability links on change management tasks for an evolving system. As part of our research we have implemented a Traceability Visualization Tool-VTrace that manages software artefacts and also enables the visualization of traceability links. The results of our controlled experiment show that subjects who used the tool were more accurate and faster on change management tasks than subjects that didn’t use the tool.
Highlights
The maintenance of software systems is one of the most time consuming and tedious tasks
As we need to test the version traceability among artefacts that evolved during the maintenance phase we considered ten revisions to our system in terms of change requests
Experimental Results and Analysis Research Question 1: Is the manual effort with respect to system evolution comprehension and change impact analysis reduced by the usage of the tool? Here we analyze the reduction of time taken with the usage of the tool to establish the traceability among different artefact versions for a system and comprehension of the system evolution
Summary
The maintenance of software systems is one of the most time consuming and tedious tasks. Comprehension of a systems architecture becomes very complex without up to date documentation [1]. The absence of valuable information makes software maintenance to take up a significant portion of the system cost [2,3]. The baselined documentation gets handed over to the maintenance team for knowledge transfer and for system architecture comprehension during change impact analysis. Such documentation carries with it rich information on the system and plays a significant role in the maintenance of a system. It is proven that usage of system documentation helps in improving the functional correctness of the changes made to the system [4]
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