MRI-R2: Development of a Software Traceability Instrument to Facilitate and Empower Traceability Research and Technology Transfer

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。该项目开发了一个软件可追溯性工具，使研究能够在各种各样的，急需的，软件相关的研究领域，如正式的方法，人机因素，软件可视化和项目管理。这项工作支持了软件工程社区的关键研究议程，并促进了可追溯性解决方案向商业和工业的技术转移。可追溯性是指捕获软件密集型系统开发项目的不同工件之间的关系的能力，包括代码，需求，设计，规范，外部法规和软件体系结构。 许多软件工程活动涉及相互依赖的工件之间的跟踪，例如，找到实现给定系统需求的软件组件，以确保构建的系统满足其预期目标，或者相反，找到与代码模块相关的所有需求，以确保系统不包含无关的和潜在的恶意功能。可追溯性工具包含一个可重复使用的跟踪算法和实用程序库，跟踪相关的数据集，任务，指标和实验结果的基准存储库，进行跟踪相关的实验，即插即用的环境，和预定义的实验模板表示常见类型的经验可追溯性实验。 该工具促进了可追溯性解决方案在广泛的软件工程活动中的应用，包括需求分析、架构设计、维护、逆向工程和IV V（独立验证和确认）或V V活动。更广泛的影响：尽管软件可追溯性至关重要，但由于任务的复杂性和易出错性，组织一直在努力实现成功和经济有效的可追溯性。尽管有一个令人信服的研究议程，可追溯性研究一直受到缺乏共享工具的阻碍。 该仪器将提供最先进的可追溯性结果，以实现下一代定制的可追溯性环境，并将为进行实证研究提供支持。结果将通过软件可追溯性卓越中心的外联工作广泛传播。该项目将为代表性不足的少数民族和本科生提供多种参与机会，并将创造三个全职工作岗位。该项目的长期广泛影响将是提高软件项目的生产力，提高软件的可靠性，以及为培训学生和从业人员制定软件工程教育课程。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).This project, developing a software traceability instrument, enables research in diverse, much needed, software-related research areas such as formal methods, human computer factors, software visualization, and project management. The work supports a critical research agenda of the software engineering community and facilitates technology transfer of traceability solutions to business and industry. Traceability refers to the ability to capture the relationships between different artifacts of a software-intensive system development project, including code, requirements, design, specifications, external regulations, and software architectures. Many software engineering activities involve tracing between interdependent artifacts, for example, finding software components that implement a given system requirement in order to assure that an as-built system meets its intended goals, or conversely, finding all the requirements that pertain to a code module to ensure that the system does not contain extraneous and potentially malicious features. The traceability instrument contains a library of reusable trace algorithms and utilities, a benchmarked repository of trace-related datasets, tasks, metrics, and experimental results, a plug-and-play environment for conducting trace-related experiments, and predefined experimental templates representing common types of empirical traceability experiments. The instrument facilitates the application of traceability solutions across a broad range of software engineering activities including requirements analysis, architectural design, maintenance, reverse engineering, and IV&V (independent verification and validation) or V&V activities. Broader Impacts: Despite the criticality of software traceability, organizations have struggled to implement successful and cost-effective traceability due to the complexity and error-proneness of the task. Despite a compelling research agenda, traceability research has been impeded by the lack of shared instruments. The instrument will make state-of-the-art traceability results available to enable the next generation of customized traceability environments and will provide support for conducting empirical research. Results will be disseminated broadly through outreach endeavors by the Center of Excellence for Software Traceability. The project will provide multiple opportunities for participation by underrepresented minorities and undergraduate students, and will create three fulltime job positions. The long-term broader impacts of the project will be to improve software project productivity and to improve the reliability of software, as well as developing software engineering educational curriculum for training students and practitioners.