Effort and Quality of Recovering Requirements-to-Code Traces: Two Exploratory Experiments

Trace links between requirements and code are essential for many software development and maintenance activities. Despite significant advances in traceability research, creating links remains a human-intensive activity and surprisingly little is known about how humans perform basic tracing tasks. We investigate fundamental research questions regarding the effort and quality of recovering traces between requirements and code. Our paper presents two exploratory experiments conducted with 100 subjects (half with industrial experience, the other half without) who recovered trace links for two open source software systems in a controlled environment and cast over 125.000 votes. In the first experiment, subjects recovered trace links between the two systems' requirements and implementation classes. In the second experiment trace links were established between requirements and implementation methods. In order to assess the validity of the trace links cast by subjects, key developers of t...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: RE
• Authors: Alexander Egyed, Florian Graf, Paul Grünbacher
• Keywords: RE 2010, Requirements, Software Engineering, Software Systems, Trace Links