Abstract
A number of important tasks in software maintenance require an up-to-date requirements traceability matrix (RTM): change impact analysis, determination of test cases to execute for regression testing, etc. The generation and maintenance of RTMs are tedious and error-prone, and they are hence often not done. In this paper, we present REquirements TRacing On-target (RETRO), a special- purpose requirements tracing tool. We discuss how RETRO automates the generation of RTMs and present the results of a study comparing manual RTM generation to RTM generation using RETRO. The study showed that RETRO found significantly more correct links than manual tracing and took only one third of the time to do so.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Huffman Hayes J, Dekhtyar A, Osborne J (2003) Improving requirements tracing via information retrieval. In: Proceedings, international requirements engineering conference (RE’2003), September 2003, Monterey, pp 151–161
Huffman Hayes J, Dekhtyar A, Sundaram KS, Howard S (2004) Helping analysts trace requirements: an objective look. In: Proceedings, international requirements engineering conference (RE’2004), September 2004, Kyoto, Japan, pp 249–261
Huffman Hayes J, Dekhtyar A and Sundaram KS (2006). Advancing candidate link generation for requirements tracing: the study of methods. IEEE Trans Softw Eng 32(1): 4–19
Yadla S, Huffman Hayes J and Dekhtyar A (2005). Tracing requirements to defect reports. Innov Syst Softw Eng A NASA J 1(2): 116–124
Huffman Hayes J, Dekhtyar A, Sundaram S (2005) Text mining for software engineering: how analyst feedback impacts final results. In: Proceedings of workshop on mining of software repositories (MSR), associated with ICSE 2005, St. Louis, MO, May 2005, pp 58–62
Huffman Hayes J, Dekhtyar A, Sundaram S (2006) Advances in dynamic generation of traceability links: two steps closer to full automation? Proceedings of IEEE International conference on Requirements Engineering, October 2007, New Delhi
Baeza-Yates R, Ribeiro-Neto B (1999) Modern information retrieval. Addison-Wesley, Reading
Huffman Hayes J, Dekhtyar A and Sundaram KS (2005). Improving after the fact tracing and mapping to support software quality predictions. IEEE Softw 22(6): 30–37
McGill K, Deadrick W, Hayes J, Dekhtyar A (2006) Houston, we have a success story: technology transfer at the NASA IV&V facility. In: Proceedings, international workshop on technology transfer in software engineering (WOTTSE’2006), Shanghai, China, May 2006
Ramesh B (1998). Factors influencing requirements traceability practice. Commun ACM 41(12): 37–44
Spanoudakis G (2002) Plausible and adaptive requirement traceability structures. In: Proceedings 14th international conference on software engineering and knowledge engineering. Ischia, Italy, July 2002, pp 135–142
Cleland-Huang J, Chang CK, Sethi G, Javvaji K, Hu H, Xia J (2002) Automating speculative queries through event-based requirements traceability. In: Proceedings of the IEEE joint international requirements engineering conference (RE’02). Essex, Germany, 9–13 September, 2002, pp 289–296
Zisman A, Spanoudakis G, Pérez-Miñana E, Krause P (2003) Tracing software requirements artefacts. In: Proceedings 2003 international conference on software engineering research and practice (SERP 2003), Las Vegas, June 2003
Schneidewind NF (1987). The state of software maintenance. IEEE Trans Softw Eng 13(3): 303–310
Bubel F, Balser M (2005) Tracing cross-cutting requirements via context-based constraints. In: Proceedings ninth European conference on software maintenance and reengineering (CSMR’05), pp 80–90
Ivkovic I, Kontogiannis K (2004) Tracing evolution changes of software artifacts through model synchronization. In: Proceedings 20th IEEE international conference on software maintenance (ICSM’04), pp 252–26
Rountev A (2004) Precise identification of side-effect-free methods in Java. In: Proceedings 20th IEEE international conference on software maintenance (ICSM’04), pp 82–91
Ryder BG, Landi W, Stocks P, Zhang S and Altucher R (2001). A schema for interprocedural modification side-effect analysis with pointer aliasing. ACM Trans Program Lang Syst 23(2): 105–186
David Eisenberg A, De Volder K (2005) Dynamic feature traces: finding features in unfamiliar code. In: Proceedings international conference on software maintenance (ICSM’05), pp 337–346
Greevy O, Ducasse S Girba T (2005) Analyzing feature traces to incorporate the semantics of change in software evolution analysis. In: Proceedings international conference on software maintenance (ICSM’05)
De Lucia A, Fasano F, Francese R, Oliveto R (2004) Recovering Traceability links between requirement artefacts: a case study. In: Proceedings 16th international conference on software engineering and knowledge engineering—workshop on knowledge oriented maintenance, Banff, Alberta, Canada, Knowledge Systems Institute, USA, pp 453–456
MDP Website, CM-1 Project, http://mdp.ivv.nasa.gov/mdp_glossary.html#CM1
Schach SR, Jin B, Yu L, Heller GZ and Offutt J (2003). Determining the distribution of maintenance categories: survey versus management. Empir Softw Eng 8: 351–366
Antoniol G, Canfora G, Casazza G, De Lucia A and Merlo E (2002). Recovering traceability links between code and documentation. IEEE Trans Softw Eng 28(10): 970–983
Antoniol G, Caprile B, Potrich A and Tonella P (1999). Design-code traceability for object oriented systems. Ann Softw Eng 9: 35–58
Høst M, Regnell B and Wohlin C (2000). Using students as subjects—a comparative study of students and professionals in lead-time impact assessment. Empir Softw Eng 5(3): 210–214
Marcus A, Maletic J (2003) Recovering documentation-to-source code traceability links using latent semantic indexing. In: Proceedings of the twenty-fifth international conference on software engineering (ICSE), pp 125–135
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Work performed while A. Dekhtyar was on the faculty at the University of Kentucky.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hayes, J.H., Dekhtyar, A., Sundaram, S.K. et al. REquirements TRacing On target (RETRO): improving software maintenance through traceability recovery. Innovations Syst Softw Eng 3, 193–202 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11334-007-0024-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11334-007-0024-1