ReqToCode: Embedding Requirements Traceability as a Structural Property of the Codebase
Thorsten Schlath\"olter

TL;DR
ReqToCode embeds requirements directly into the codebase as traceable elements, ensuring compile-time verification of traceability and reducing the risk of degradation over the software lifecycle.
Contribution
The paper introduces Traceables, a novel language-native code element that maintains requirements traceability within the code, validated during build time, unlike prior retrospective approaches.
Findings
Traceables enable automatic validation of requirement links during build.
The approach reduces trace degradation and improves safety-critical software reliability.
Lifecycle management provides actionable signals for requirement updates.
Abstract
Requirements traceability in safety-critical software development remains largely dependent on external documentation maintained separately from the systems it describes. This separation introduces structural fragility: traces degrade silently as requirements, code, and tests evolve independently across tools, repositories, and revisions. Recent advances in LLM-based traceability focus on recovering broken links after the fact - an inherently retrospective approach. This paper introduces ReqToCode, an approach that prevents trace degradation by embedding traceable system elements directly into the codebase, making traceability a compile-time verifiable property of the system rather than an external documentation task. Central to the approach is the concept of the Traceable - a language-native, generated code element that represents a single requirement and carries its metadata.…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSoftware Engineering Research · Software Engineering Techniques and Practices · Safety Systems Engineering in Autonomy
