A case study on value-based requirements tracing

ABSTRACT

Project managers aim at keeping track of interdependencies between various artifacts of the software development lifecycle, to find out potential requirements conflicts, to better understand the impact of change requests, and to fulfill process quality standards, such as CMMI requirements. While there are many methods and techniques on how to technically store requirements traces, the economic issues of dealing with requirements tracing complexity remain open. In practice tracing is typically not an explicit systematic process, but occurs rather ad hoc with considerable hidden tracing-related quality costs. This paper reports a case study on value-based requirements tracing (VBRT) that systematically supports project managers in tailoring requirements tracing precision and effort based on the parameters stakeholder value, requirements risk/volatility, and tracing costs. Main results of the case study were: (a) VBRT took around 35% effort of full requirements tracing; (b) more risky or volatile requirements warranted more detailed tracing because of their higher change probability.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.9 Management
          Subjects: Software quality assurance (SQA)

General Terms:
Documentation, Economics, Experimentation, Management, Measurement, Verification

Keywords:
case study, empirical evaluation, requirements tracing, value-based software engineering