Collaborative Traceability Management: Challenges and Opportunities
Paper in proceeding, 2016

Traceability and the management of tracing links are important for various reasons, including to manage knowledge about a complex software system, to monitor the progress of its development, and to prove that it is developed in accordance to regulations. However, maintaining tracing links and using them in a beneficial way proves to be challenging in practice. In this paper, we investigate traceability and its management as a collaboration problem. Based on 15 industrial cases and 24 semi-structured interviews we identify a) challenges in collaborative traceability management and b) how traceability management can be used to enable collaboration. Our findings show that main challenges are boundaries between organizations and tools, a lack of common goals and responsibilities, and the difficulty of collaboratively maintaining trace links. On the other hand, traceability can be an important facilitator for documentation and knowledge management.

traceability management

collaboration

Author

Rebekka Wohlrab

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Engineering (Chalmers)

Jan-Philipp Steghöfer

University of Gothenburg

Eric Knauss

University of Gothenburg

Salome Maro

University of Gothenburg

Anthony Anjorin

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Engineering (Chalmers)

Proceedings of 24th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE' 16)

2332-6441 (ISSN)

216-225
978-1-5090-4121-3 (ISBN)

Driving Forces

Sustainable development

Subject Categories

Software Engineering

DOI

10.1109/RE.2016.17

ISBN

978-1-5090-4121-3

More information

Created

10/7/2017