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A case study on value-based requirements tracing

Published: 05 September 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Project managers aim at keeping track of interdependencies between various artifacts of the software development lifecycle, to find out potential requirements conflicts, to better understand the impact of change requests, and to fulfill process quality standards, such as CMMI requirements. While there are many methods and techniques on how to technically store requirements traces, the economic issues of dealing with requirements tracing complexity remain open. In practice tracing is typically not an explicit systematic process, but occurs rather ad hoc with considerable hidden tracing-related quality costs. This paper reports a case study on value-based requirements tracing (VBRT) that systematically supports project managers in tailoring requirements tracing precision and effort based on the parameters stakeholder value, requirements risk/volatility, and tracing costs. Main results of the case study were: (a) VBRT took around 35% effort of full requirements tracing; (b) more risky or volatile requirements warranted more detailed tracing because of their higher change probability.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ESEC/FSE-13: Proceedings of the 10th European software engineering conference held jointly with 13th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering
September 2005
402 pages
ISBN:1595930140
DOI:10.1145/1081706
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 05 September 2005

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  1. case study
  2. empirical evaluation
  3. requirements tracing
  4. value-based software engineering

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