Supporting Software Understanding with Automated Requirements Traceability

Requirements traceability (RT) aims at defining and utilizing relationships between stakeholder requirements and artifacts produced during the software development lifecycle and provides an important means to foster software understanding. Although techniques for generating and validating RT are available, RT in practice often suffers from the enormous effort and complexity of creating and maintaining traces. This results in invalid or incomplete trace information which cannot support engineers in real-world problems. In this paper we present a tool-supported approach that requires the designer to specify some trace dependencies but eases trace acquisition by generating others automatically. We illustrate the approach using a video-on-demand system and show how the generated traces can be used in various engineering scenarios to improve software understanding. In a case study using an open source software application we demonstrate that the approach is capable of dealing with large-scale problems and delivers valid results.