Taming Cross-Tool Traceability in the Wild

Along the process of engineering a safety-critical system, software engineers produce various artifacts, ranging from requirements and change requests to source code and test cases. In order to aid the development of the system and to adhere to the complex safety regulations and standards in place, engineers are often required to maintain bidirectional and consistent traceability between the produced artifacts. However, such artifacts are rarely maintained in one single tool. Because of that, the cross-tool bidirectional traces have to frequently be manually maintained, which can easily become a very time-consuming or infeasible task. Through interviews and observations at our industry partners in regulated domains, we observed that a number of different strategies are used to deal with this challenge. The use of naming conventions, querying, or URL links is observed in the industry. However, they have their shortcomings and hinder engineers from realizing the full potential that traceability can offer. Knowing the challenges in the industry, we explored existing literature. A range of approaches in the literature aims at dealing with traceability, but often they are context-specific and not easily transferable into practice. Given this gap between the state-of-the-art and industry needs, we performed interviews with our industry partners and analyzed tertiary studies from the literature to obtain a better understanding of what traceability properties are needed to unleash the potential of traces. We identified properties that represent the shared challenges between the related work and the industry requirements: discoverability, type checks, flexibility, navigability, and extensibility. While each property is addressed by a subset of the available solutions, we propose a novel traceability approach to support all of them in a single tool.