How do we trace requirements: an initial study of analyst behavior in trace validation tasks

Traceability recovery is a tedious, error-prone, person-power intensive task, even if aided by automated traceability tools. Human analysts must vet candidate traceability links retrieved by such tools and must often go looking for links that such tools fail to locate as they build a traceability matrix. This paper examines a research version of the traceability tool REquirements TRacing On target (RETRO) that logs analyst actions. We examine the user logs in order to understand how analysts work on traceability recovery tasks. Such information is a pre-requisite to understanding how to better design traceability tools to best utilize analyst time while developing a high quality final traceability matrix.

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