Why and How Your Traceability Should Evolve: Insights from an Automotive Supplier

TL;DR

This paper explores the necessity and methods for evolving traceability practices in automotive software development to accommodate changing contexts, stakeholder needs, and organizational structures.

Contribution

It provides insights into how traceability can be adapted throughout the development lifecycle and across organizational boundaries, emphasizing flexible management and tool support.

Findings

Traceability needs evolve with development stages and organizational changes.

Flexible traceability management supports both agile teams and cross-organizational collaboration.

Requirements for tools include data quality, change management, versioning, and organizational traceability.

Abstract

Traceability is a key enabler of various activities in automotive software and systems engineering and required by several standards. However, most existing traceability management approaches do not consider that traceability is situated in constantly changing development contexts involving multiple stakeholders. Together with an automotive supplier, we analyzed how technology, business, and organizational factors raise the need for flexible traceability. We present how traceability can be evolved in the development lifecycle, from early elicitation of traceability needs to the implementation of mature traceability strategies. Moreover, we shed light on how traceability can be managed flexibly within an agile team and more formally when crossing team borders and organizational borders. Based on these insights, we present requirements for flexible tool solutions, supporting varying levels of data quality, change propagation, versioning, and organizational traceability.