Title

REquirements Tracing On target (RETRO): Improving Software Maintenance through Traceability Recovery

Author Info

Jane Huffman Hayes, University of Kentucky
Alex Dekhtyar, University of Kentucky
Senthil Sundaram, University of Kentucky
E. Ashlee Holbrook, University of Kentucky
Sravanthi Vadlamudi, University of Kentucky
Alain April, Université du Québec

Recommended Citation

Postprint version. Published in Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering, Volume 3, Issue 3, January 1, 2007, pages 193-202.

NOTE: At the time of publication, the author Alex Dekhtyar was not yet affiliated with Cal Poly.

The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11334-007-0024-1.

Abstract

A number of important tasks in software maintenance require an up-to-date requirements traceability matrix (RTM): change impact analysis, determination of test cases to execute for regression testing, etc. The generation and maintenance of RTMs are tedious and error-prone, and they are hence often not done. In this paper, we present REquirements TRacing On-target (RETRO), a special- purpose requirements tracing tool. We discuss how RETRO automates the generation of RTMs and present the results of a study comparing manual RTM generation to RTM generation using RETRO. The study showed that RETRO found significantly more correct links than manual tracing and took only one third of the time to do so.

Disciplines

Computer Sciences

Copyright

2007 Springer.