Managing Traceability Information Models: Not such a simple task after all?

TL;DR

This paper investigates the challenges faced by companies in managing traceability information models (TIMs), highlighting gaps in scientific support and emphasizing the need for research to address practical issues like scale and workflow integration.

Contribution

It provides an in-depth analysis of real-world TIM management practices and calls for targeted research to address practical challenges overlooked by existing literature.

Findings

Companies manage TIMs differently despite similarities.

Existing scientific work does not consider practical needs.

Challenges include scale and workflow integration.

Abstract

Practitioners are poorly supported by the scientific literature when managing traceability information models (TIMs), which capture the structure and semantics of trace links. In practice, companies manage their TIMs in very different ways, even in cases where companies share many similarities. We present our findings from an in-depth focus group about TIM management with three different systems engineering companies. We find that the concrete needs of the companies as well as challenges such as scale and workflow integration are not considered by existing scientific work. We thus issue a call-to-arms for the requirements engineering and software and systems traceability communities, the two main communities for traceability research, to refocus their work on these practical problems.