Serin Jeong, Seonah Lee

KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering, Vol. 7, No. 9, pp. 325-334, Sep. 2018
10.3745/KTSDE.2018.7.9.325,   PDF Download:
Keywords: requirement engineering, Requirement Traceability, Traceability Matrix, RTM
Abstract

Requirement traceability should be continuously maintained in software development and evolution. However, it is usually updated in practice in the quality assurance phase. The gap between “is” and “should” exists due to the fact that developers must invest considerable effort to update requirement traceability while being able to obtain only marginal benefit from the updated traceability. To close this gap, we propose a spreadsheet application that enables developers to flexibly change mappings in a requirement traceability matrix. In this way, developers can reduce their effort in updating the requirement traceability matrix, but still obtain the common form of a requirement traceability matrix on a spreadsheet. The proposed application maintains the mappings between two artifacts on each sheet so that, whenever an artifact item changes, developers can instantly insert the relevant mapping changes. Then, when developers desire the common form of a requirement traceability matrix, the proposed application calculates the mappings among several artifacts and creates the matrix. The application also checks traceability errors and calculates the metrics so that developers can understand the completeness of the matrix. To understand the applicability of the proposed approach, we conducted a case study, which shows that the proposed application can be applied to the real project and easily incorporate the mapping changes.

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