Determining the cost-quality trade-off for automated software traceability

Major software development standards mandate the establishment of trace links among software artifacts such as requirements, architectural elements, or source code without explicitly stating the required level of detail of these links. However, the level of detail vastly affects the cost and quality of trace link generation and important applications of trace analysis such as conflict analysis, consistency checking, or change impact analysis. In this paper, we explore these cost-quality trade-offs with three case study systems from different contexts - the open-source ArgoUML modeling tool, an industrial route-planning system, and a movie player. We report the cost-quality trade-off of automated trace generation with the Trace Analyzer approach and discuss its expected impact onto several applications that consume its trace information. In the study we explore simple techniques to predict and manipulate the cost-benefit trade-off with threshold-based filtering. We found that (a) 80% of the benefit comes from only 20% of the cost and (b) weak trace links are predominantly false trace links and can be efficiently eliminated through thresholds.