Toward Reference Models for Requirements Traceability
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Software Engineering: Facts and Fallacies
Software Engineering: Facts and Fallacies
Overcoming the Traceability Benefit Problem
RE '05 Proceedings of the 13th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
A Realistic Empirical Evaluation of the Costs and Benefits of UML in Software Maintenance
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Code patterns for automatically validating requirements-to-code traces
Proceedings of the 27th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
Analyzing the tracing of requirements and source code during software development
REFSQ'13 Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality
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For decades now, mainstream development environments provide the same basic automations for navigating source code: mainly searching and the tree exploration of files and folders. This may imply that other automations have little additional value or too steep a learning curve for mainstream adoption. This paper investigates whether source code navigation enriched with traceability benefit basic maintenance tasks such as changing features and fixing bugs in code. To test this, we conducted a controlled experiment with 52 subjects performing real maintenance tasks on two third-party development projects: all with the same navigation tool but half of the tasks with and the other half without traceability navigation. We found that the existence of traceability profoundly affected the quality of the change tasks and fundamentally changed how software engineers navigated through source code. We show that software engineers benefit instantly from traceability, without training, which is to show that the current automations available to software engineers are by no means sufficient or the only easy ones to use.