A Systematic Review of Tracing Solutions in Software Product Lines

TL;DR

This paper systematically reviews traceability solutions in Software Product Lines, highlighting their importance for managing complexity and variability, and analyzing the current state and challenges of implementing traceability in this context.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive literature review of traceability solutions in Software Product Lines, identifying gaps and common practices.

Findings

Traceability is often implemented for specific constraints like certification.

Many systems lack systematic traceability solutions.

Traceability implementation varies widely across projects.

Abstract

Software Product Lines are large-scale, multi-unit systems that enable massive, customized production. They consist of a base of reusable artifacts and points of variation that provide the system with flexibility, allowing generating customized products. However, maintaining a system with such complexity and flexibility could be error prone and time consuming. Indeed, any modification (addition, deletion or update) at the level of a product or an artifact would impact other elements. It would therefore be interesting to adopt an efficient and organized traceability solution to maintain the Software Product Line. Still, traceability is not systematically implemented. It is usually set up for specific constraints (e.g. certification requirements), but abandoned in other situations. In order to draw a picture of the actual conditions of traceability solutions in Software Product Lines context, we decided to address a literature review. This review as well as its findings is detailed in the present article.