TracIMo: a traceability introduction methodology and its evaluation in an Agile development team

Abstract

Software traceability, the ability to relate software development artifacts such as requirements, design models and code to each other, is an important aspect in software development. It yields a number of benefits such as facilitating impact analysis and tracking software changes. However, for companies to reap these benefits, a proper traceability strategy—a plan for how traceability should be managed—needs to be defined and implemented. Existing literature lacks concrete guidelines for practitioners to systematically define such a strategy. In this study, we address this gap by defining a Traceability Introduction Methodology (TracIMo), which is a methodology for systematically designing, implementing and evaluating software traceability in practice. We used design science research to design TracIMo and evaluated it in a case study with an agile development team of a company in the finance domain. Our results show that TracIMo is feasible as it allows incremental definition and evaluation of a traceability strategy that is aligned with the company’s traceability goals and the existing development process. We also report practical challenges encountered when designing a traceability strategy such as defining the right level of granularity and the need for defining intermediate development artifacts.