An Analysis of the Requirements Traceability Problem

Gotel, O. C. Z., & Finkelstein, C. W. (1994). An Analysis of the Requirements Traceability Problem. Proceedings of the First International Conference on Requirements Engineering, 94-101.

Type

Conference paper

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1994

Pages

94-101

DOI

10.1109/icre.1994.292398

DOI registrant

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Link

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRE.1994.292398

Cited from

operations_research

Cited by

2 citations across 2 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Traceability
  • Traceability is the structural property by which any element of a system—a component, decision, transformation, or outcome—can be linked backward through its complete history of derivation, origin, and custody to its source, and forward through its current and downstream uses, enabling audit, attribution, impact analysis, and accountability on demand, as Gotel and Finkelstein (1994) formalized in their canonical analysis of the requirements traceability problem.

    This sourceIEEE. Foundational analysis based on study of 100+ practitioners; introduces pre-RS and post-RS traceability and frames the bidirectional linkage requirement that defines the field.

    Supported in partVerified against the work's full text

    Gotel and Finkelstein define requirements traceability as following a requirement's life forwards and backwards, which supports the bidirectional core but only for requirements, not any system element.

    “Requirements traceability refers to the ability to describe and follow the life of a requirement, in both a forwards and backwards direction (i.e., from its origins, through its development and specification, to its subsequent deployment”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

Mechanisms

• Change Impact Report
  • Its failure mode is that a report is only as complete as the trace links behind it

    This sourceShows that traceability-dependent analysis is bounded by the project information and interconnections that are actually recorded and maintained.

Verification

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