ieee - motivation matters in traceability trenches

8/8/2019 IEEE - Motivation Matters In Traceability Trenches

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/ieee-motivation-matters-in-traceability-trenches 1/17

MOTIVATION MATTERS INTHE TRACEABILITY

TRENCHESSWE522 ± SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

ENGINEERING

Ozan Can ÇALI

Presented To: Taflan Gündem



What is Software Requirements

Traceability? SW Requirements Traceability is used to find the origin of

requirements and to track changes made to them

Traceability is applied to understand the connection

between high level-and low level requirements

Traceability is used to follow the «life» of a requirementfrom its origins through all the periods to the deployment

and use

*from Wikipedia

SWE522 - Requirements Traceability 2



A Survey on Traceability

At the 17th IEEE International Requirements Engineering

Conference (2009), the software requirements traceability

practice in companies is discussed and the results are

gathered in the essay named Motivation Matters in theTraceability Trenches by P. Mäder, O. Gotel and Ilka

Philippow

The answer to the question «what are the motivations for

companies to adopt traceability in their software

production processes» is seeked

Ten companies are surveyed for this purpose




Only two out of ten companies are known to have a prior interest in traceability

Four interviews took place in the company¶s offices, six

are realized via phone (impossible to determine whether

they are indeed doing what they claim)

Interviews lasted between 1-2 hours; 1-3 interviews per

company

Companies reported mostly on their current project about

specific data on roles, artifacts (UML diagrams,requirement and design documents, models, analyses,

tests), processes and tools




Four Motivations, Four Environments

These companies are divided into four environments

according to their motivation to use traceability:

1) regulated: to satify the regulations of the industry or

company

2) sub-contractor: to satisfy the demands of the

customers, in this case the regulated

3) consultant: to support company-specific efforts to

improve processes

4) enthusiast: for individual improvement




Selection of Cases


The above table shows the number of employees in each

company, the age of the companies, the industries

companies operate in (mostly automative industry), and

the type of offerings the companies work on.

The projects are mostly so large that they need elaborate

requirements planning.



Findings of the Survey

Support for post-requirements traceability exists

More data is needed to use traceability tools

Dissatisfaction for the outcomes of the used tools

Companies say that traceability of pre-requirements ismore important than traceability of post-requirements




Questions asked to the companies to find

out the motivations

Whether: is requirements traceability performed?

Where: which companies (size, domain, project types) are

doing traceability?

Why: why do companies perform traceability?

Who: who in the company is responsible for traceability?

When: when/at which steps is traceability used?

What: at what level/degree is traceability performed?

How: how is a traceability process defined? Which tools

are used?




Observations & Answers

Whether?

Traceability is used by all environments

They know what to expect, but cannot evaluate the

retrievals properly

Where?

As mentioned in the first table; three large, six medium

and one small company conduct projects in the

automotive, avionic, IT-security and insurance fields.




Why? The regulateds employ traceability to meet with a mature process

because of their tough requirements. Regulations are also a

motivation in case of safety-critical software developments. They

also want to gain information on the implementation status of the

project. The sub-contractors are hired by the regulated and therefore they

have to obey the regulations of them.

The consultants create development processes for the regulated

and hence they address maturity or regulation requirements like the

regulated as part of consulting.

The enthusiasts show an interest in traceability to improve

themselves in the making of the project. They learn a tool and that

help them in process quality, control, maturity and navigation

between related documents.




Who?

The traceability process is created by the consultant,

used by the regulated and applied to the sub-contractor;

so their approach to traceability processes is pretty

much the same

The enthusiast also employ traceability processes, but

rather with their own tools which are not always

compatible consistent for common types of traceability




When?

Traceability is established in parallel to the

development, not during the post-development

Practitioners do not want to procrastinate traceability,

they think it is worth giving high effort




What?

At least two levels of requirements traceability: tracing

between high- and low-level requirements, or tracingbetween test cases to requirements; or sometimes

tracing into code and tracing into bug tickets

Problem: Finding the right granularity to relate artifacts




How?

The regulated: The projects being worked on are usually large and

their budgets are high, hence the money spent on traceability tools

is only a minor factor

They use DOORS as the requirements management tool along

with other modeling tools

Problems faced:

-Providing a decent traceability for the sub-contractor

-Versioning of traceability relations

The sub-contractor

Problems faced:

-Bridging the gap between specification and design

-Exchange of model and traceability between different tools (they usually

use an additional tool other than the one required by the regulated)




The consultant: They use an integrated tool chain (requirementsmanagement, testing, modeling tools) for the regulated they work

for

Problems faced:

-Tool customization

-Bad integration solutions for traceability

-Versioning of traceability relations

The enthusiast

Problems faced:

-Poor visualization and traceability usage of the utilized modeling tools-Poor integration of the tracking tool and the modeling tool

-Therefore, unlike other environments, they tend to use a single tool




Conclusion

Companies are fond of traceability processes, but there

are issues

Software systems being built are getting more complex

Tools gained importance: Practitioners can onlydo what tools offer, which is a main problem

Pre-requirements traceability is more supported

Lack of guidance for practitioners to establish traceability

Lack of workflow to track traceability across organizationaland regional boundaries

Different formats from different CASE tool vendors make

the versioning of traceability relations hard


ieee - motivation matters in traceability trenches

Documents