A rich traceability model for social interactions

Abstract

In 1993, Goguen published a research note addressing the social issues in Requirements Engineering. He identified in the requirements process three major social groups: the client organization; the requirements team; and the development team. However, nowadays there is a lack of technological support that traces requirements to social issues on the requirements team or development team. From early published traceability metamodels to current requirements traceability literature, the client organization and the stakeholders are first-class citizens, but the software engineers and the interactions between these groups are not. In this paper we present a partially formalized RichPicture traceability model to fill this gap. ITrace is a flexible model to weave together the social network graph, the information sources graph, the social interactions graph, and the Requirements Engineering artifacts evolution graph. We empirically developed our traceability model tracking a Transparency catalogue evolution. We also compare our model structure to Contribution Structures.