U.S.-Germany Cooperative Research on the Technical and Empirical Foundations for Requirements Traceability

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This award supports Professor Balasubramanian Ramesh and a U.S. graduate student from the Naval Postgraduate School to collaborate in manufacturing engineering research with Professor Matthias Jarke and his research group of the Technical University of Aachen, Germany. They are studying the technical and empirical foundations for requirements traceability, which is widely used as a measure of the quality of the systems development process, ultimately related to modern methods for product development. Their collaboration is built on the integration of complementary empirical research by Professor Ramesh and theoretical techniques developed by Professor Jarke and his group. Aachen is a world leader in design and manufacturing engineering, and is currently participating in a regional European effort in the area of traceability requirements. Current practices as well as the usefulness of traceability vary considerably across systems development efforts. Weaknesses include the lack of comprehensive guidelines on what kinds of information must be captured, and when, and how it should be used to support various stakeholder needs. Professors Ramesh and Jarke will integrate their independently developed traceability models, incorporate them into a prototype implementation scheme and conduct empirical evaluations of the research results in large scale system development projects. The results of their cooperative research are likely to influence the design of the next generation of Computer Aided System Engineering (CASE) environments, to the benefit of the concurrent design process in many industries.