CONTRIBUTION STRUCTURES FOR REQUIREMENTS TRACEABILITY
Olly Gotel · 1995
Our research is concerned with the problem of requirements traceability (RT). In the context of systems and software engineering, RT refers to the ability to describe and follow the life of a requirement in both a forwards and backwards direction. Despite being highlighted as an area in need of improvement in the 1970's, being introduced as a mandatory activity in numerous standards, and a surge in dedicated support, RT remains cited as one of the dominating problem areas by industry today. In recognising that RT problems are multifaceted in nature, and that there is unlikely to be an allencompassing solution, we attribute their persistence to the distinct lack of any thorough problem analysis. Prevailing approaches to RT only provide partial solutions because, being primarily solution-driven, they fail to account for the underlying issues which actually cause and perpetuate RT problems in practice. Consequently, our position is that the greatest potential for relieving RT problems lies in identifying and addressing those fundamental issues which underlie extant problems. Arguing our position, we suggest that the crux of the RT problem revolves around the paucity and unreliability of information about the human sources of requirements. This suggestion is directly based upon findings from an empirical analysis of the RT problem conducted with over one hundred practitioners. In these studies, we found that practitioners predominantly claim to have experienced RT problems when, being unable to retrieve