A systematic literature review on requirements tracing approaches

Abstract

Requirements management (RM) is one of the most important parts in software engineering. A subtopic of RM is requirements traceability.<br />Requirements traceability means to be able to tell in which part of the software a specific requirement has been implemented and vice versa.<br />This ability offers many benefits, such as the possibility to estimate which effect a change will have or to track completion status. Therefore several different approaches exist for it. In the last 15 years much research has been conducted in the field of requirements tracing. But results are very numerous and often unordered as well. Researchers publish very valuable work, but it often lacks the context to a general procedural concept. There are some literature surveys. However existing reviews are rather focused and do not provide a procedural overview, but just give a disambiguation on traceability.<br />The goal of this work is to clear the view on the latest developments in the field of requirements traceability by carrying out a systematic literature review on the recent scientific contributions about requirements traceability.<br />Concerning the study methodology I will apply the concept of the systematic literature review. Coming from the domain of medical sciences it provides a more structured and repeatable process than traditional literature surveys. My work also provides researchers with a generic lightweight-guideline to conduct systematic literature reviews in the field of software engineering. With the following survey the reader also gets a tangible example how our process is applied. So my work should serve as a good starting point for researchers in this field, as this work can show in which aspects of requirements tracing further research is necessary. But it can also provide practitioners with a sound overview and ideas to improve their requirements tracing process.<br />Practitioners might be more interested in the well-covered topics of requirements tracing, where they can find ready-to-use concepts for their work. I therefore also try to offer such an overview.<br />