An end-to-end industrial software traceability tool

Traceability is an important aspect of software development that is often required by various professional standards and government agencies. Yet current industrial approaches do not typically address end-to-end traceability. Moreover, many industry projects become entangled in process overhead and fail to derive much benefit from current traceability solutions. This paper presents a successful end-to-end software traceability tool developed at Wonderware, a software development company and a business unit of Invensys Systems, Inc. This process-oriented approach achieves comprehensive traceability and supports the entire software development life cycle by focusing on both requirements traceability and process traceability. We offer new perspectives in analyzing the problem as well as general traceability guidelines. These guidelines have emerged from the experience of implementing and deploying the traceability tool within actual company constraints. We discuss encouraging results and point to the advantages gained in using our approach.