Understanding where requirements are implemented
Benedikt Burgstaller, Alexander F. Egyed · 2010
Trace links between requirements and code reveal where requirements are implemented. Such trace links are essential for code understanding and change management. The lack thereof is often cited as a key reason for software engineering failure. Unfortunately, the creation and maintenance of requirements-to-code traces remains a largely manual and error prone task due to the informal nature of requirements. This paper demonstrates that reasoning about requirements-to-code traces can be done, in part, by considering the calling relationships within the source code (call graph). We observed that requirements-to-code traces form regions along calling dependencies. Better knowledge about these regions has several direct benefits. For example, erroneous traces become detectable if a method inside a region does not trace to a requirement. Or, a missing trace (incompleteness) can be identified. Knowledge of requirement regions can also be used to help guide developers in establishing requirements-to-code traces in a more efficient manner. This paper discusses requirement regions and sketches their benefits.