Software Traceability: Trends and Future Directions

Software traceability is a sought-after, yet often elusive qual-ity in software-intensive systems. Required in safety-critical systems by many certifying bodies, such as the USA Fed-eral Aviation Authority, software traceability is an essential element of the software development process. In practice, traceability is often conducted in an ad-hoc, after-the-fact manner and, therefore, its benefits are not always fully real-ized. Over the past decade, researchers have focused on spe-cific areas of the traceability problem, developing more so-phisticated tooling, promoting strategic planning, applying information retrieval techniques capable of semi-automating the trace creation and maintenance process, developing new trace query languages and visualization techniques that use trace links, and applying traceability in specific domains such as Model Driven Development, product line systems, and agile project environments. In this paper, we build upon a prior body of work to highlight the state-of-the-art in soft-ware traceability, and to present compelling areas of research that need to be addressed