Assessing the effect of requirements traceability for software maintenance
Assessing the effect of requirements traceability for software maintenance
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DOI：
10.1109/icsm.2012.6405269
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发表时间：
2012-09
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Patrick Mäder;Alexander Egyed
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Patrick Mäder;Alexander Egyed
需求可追溯性的拥护者经常引用诸如更容易的程序理解和对软件维护（即软件变更）的支持等优点。然而，尽管需求可追溯性越来越受欢迎，但是目前还没有关于需求可追溯性有用性的公开评估。调查需求可追溯性的使用是否能够显著地支持开发任务，从而最终证明其成本是合理的，这是很重要的，如果不是至关重要的话。因此，我们在两个第三方开发项目中进行了一个控制实验，有52个受试者执行实际的维护任务：一半的任务具有可追溯性，另一半没有可追溯性。我们的研究结果表明，具有可追溯性的对象在任务中执行速度平均快了21%，创造了平均多60%的正确解决方案——这表明可追溯性不仅节省了下游成本，而且可以深刻地提高软件维护质量。此外，我们的目标是初始成本-收益评估，并通过使用与在评估系统中建立可追溯性的初始成本相关的可追溯性来设置可测量的时间减少。
Advocates of requirements traceability regularly cite advantages like easier program comprehension and support for software maintenance (i.e., software change). However, despite its growing popularity, there exists no published evaluation about the usefulness of requirements traceability. It is important, if not crucial, to investigate whether the use of requirements traceability can significantly support development tasks to eventually justify its costs. We thus conducted a controlled experiment with 52 subjects performing real maintenance tasks on two third-party development projects: half of the tasks with and the other half without traceability. Our findings show that subjects with traceability performed on average 21% faster on a task and created on average 60% more correct solutions - suggesting that traceability not only saves downstream cost but can profoundly improve software maintenance quality. Furthermore, we aimed for an initial cost-benefit estimation and set the measured time reductions by using traceability in relation to the initial costs for setting-up traceability in the evaluated systems.