Salome Maro

Traceability maintenance: factors and guidelines

Traceability is an important concern for numerous software engineering activities. Establishing traceability links is a challenging and cost-intensive task, which is uneconomical without suitable strategies for maintaining high link quality. Current approaches to Traceability Management (TM), however, often make important assumptions and choices without ensuring that the consequences and implications for trace-ability maintenance are feasible and desirable in practice. In this paper, therefore, we identify a set of core factors that influence how the quality of traceability links can be maintained. For each factor, we discuss relevant challenges and provide guidelines on how best to ensure viable traceability maintenance in a practical TM approach. Our guidelines are meant to be used by tool developers and users to select the most appropriate TM approach for their needs. Our results are based on and supported by data collected from interviews conducted with: (i) 9 of our industrial and academic project partners to elicit requirements for a TM tool, and (ii) 24 software development stakeholders from 15 industrial cases to provide a broader overview of the current state of the practice on TM. To evaluate the feasibility of our guidelines, we investigate a set of existing TM approaches used in industry with respect to our guidelines.

Collaborative Traceability Management: Challenges and Opportunities

Traceability and trace link management are important for various reasons, including managing knowledge about a complex software system, monitoring the progress of its development, and proving that it is developed in accordance to regulations. However, it is difficult to maintain and use trace links in real-world projects where artifacts undergo constant change and multiple stakeholders are involved. In this paper, we extend the current body of knowledge on traceability management by regarding its collaborative aspects in an industrial setting. Based on 15 industrial cases and semi-structured interviews with 24 practitioners, we identify challenges involved in collaborative traceability management, and how traceability management can be used to enable collaboration. Our findings show that main challenges are boundaries between organizations and tools, a lack of common goals and responsibilities, and the difficulty of collaboratively maintaining trace links. We also identify traceability as an important facilitator for communication and knowledge management across these boundaries.

On integrating graphical and textual editors for a UML profile based domain specific language: an industrial experience

Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) are an established means of reducing the gap between problem and solution domains. DSLs increase productivity and improve quality as they can be tailored to exactly fit the needs of the problem to be solved. A DSL can have multiple notations including textual and graphical notations. In some cases, one of these notations for a DSL is enough but there are many cases where a single notation does not suffice and there is a demand to support multiple notations for the same DSL. UML profile is one of several approaches used to define a DSL, however most UML tools only come with graphical editors. In this paper, we present our approach and industrial experience on integrating textual and graphical editors for a UML profile-based DSL. This work was conducted as part of an explorative study at Ericsson. The main aim of the study was to investigate how to introduce a textual editor to an already existing UML profile-based DSL in an Eclipse environment. We report on the challenges of integrating textual and graphical editors for UML profile-based DSLs in practice, our chosen approach, specific constraints and requirements of the study.

Challenges of Establishing Traceability in the Automotive Domain

Traceability, i.e., relationships between artifacts in software development, is prescribed by quality standards such as ISO 26262 and therefore mandatory for automotive companies that develop safety-critical systems. However, establishing traceability is a challenge for many automotive companies. The objective of this study is to identify traceability challenges and solutions in this domain and compare these challenges and solutions with the ones in literature. To achieve this, we conducted a case study with a large automotive supplier to discover their traceability challenges and a tertiary literature review on existing traceability literature surveys to identify reported challenges and their solutions. We found 13 challenges from the literature study, of which ten were also found at the company. Three challenges are solved at the company with solutions that correlate with those proposed in literature, three are partially solved while four are still unsolved even though there are solutions in literature.

Tackling combinatorial explosion: a study of industrial needs and practices for analyzing highly configurable systems

Highly configurable systems are complex pieces of software. To tackle this complexity, hundreds of dedicated analysis techniques have been conceived, many of which able to analyze system properties for all possible system configurations, as opposed to traditional, single-system analyses. Unfortunately, it is largely unknown whether these techniques are adopted in practice, whether they address actual needs, or what strategies practitioners actually apply to analyze highly configurable systems. We present a study of analysis practices and needs in industry. It relied on a survey with 27 practitioners engineering highly configurable systems and followup interviews with 15 of them, covering 18 different companies from eight countries. We confirm that typical properties considered in the literature (e.g., reliability) are relevant, that consistency between variability models and artifacts is critical, but that the majority of analyses for specifications of configuration options (a.k.a., variability model analysis) is not perceived as needed. We identified rather pragmatic analysis strategies, including practices to avoid the need for analysis. For instance, testing with experience-based sampling is the most commonly applied strategy, while systematic sampling is rarely applicable. We discuss analyses that are missing and synthesize our insights into suggestions for future research.

Software traceability in the automotive domain: Challenges and solutions

Abstract In the automotive domain, the development of all safety-critical systems has to comply with safety standards such as ISO 26262. These standards require established traceability, the ability to relate artifacts created during development of a system, to ensure resulting systems are well-tested and therefore safe. This paper contrasts general traceability challenges and solutions with those specific to the automotive domain, and investigates how they manifest in practice. We combine three data sources: a tertiary literature review to identify general challenges and solutions; a case study with an automotive supplier as validation for how the challenges and solutions are experienced in practice; and a multi-vocal literature review to identify challenges and solutions specific to the automotive domain. We found 22 challenges and 16 unique solutions in the reviews. 17 challenges were identified in the case study; six remain unsolved. We discuss challenges and solutions from the perspectives of academia, tool vendors, consultants and users, and identify differences between scientific and “grey” literature. We discuss why challenges remain unsolved and propose solutions. Our findings indicate that there is a significant overlap between general traceability challenges and those in the automotive domain but that they are experienced differently.

An ISO 26262 Compliant Design Flow and Tool for Automotive Multicore Systems

Model-based design processes in the automotive industry must support standards like ISO 26262. Especially for smaller suppliers developing software for OEMs, large-scale methodologies like AUTOSAR are impractical. Instead, smaller, focused processes that still allow ISO 26262 compliance are required. In addition, the steps in the process must be well-supported by the development tool-chain, in particular when developing complex multicore systems. In this paper, we show such a process based on existing design flows and the current state of an automotive modelling tool. We structure the design flow to ensure compliance with the ISO 26262, where necessary complementing it with required steps to ensure safety. Furthermore, supporting tools extending the modelling tool are discussed. As a result, the presented design flow covers all development phases.

Capra: A Configurable and Extendable Traceability Management Tool

Traceability is a known problem both in academia and industry. One of the main challenges is that there is no one solution that will solve traceability problems for everyone in industry. Traceability needs are dependent on the context of the organization and can differ from project to project in the same organization. To cater for this problem we have developed Capra, an open source, flexible, configurable and extendable traceability management tool. Capra can be tailored according to specific traceability needs of individual projects and organizations.