Complementarity in Requirements Tracing

Complementarity between activities reveals that doing any one of them increases the returns to doing the others. In other words, complementarity leads to the synergistic effect that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Identifying and exploiting complementarity can benefit many cybernetic activities, where human–machine interactions are inherent and dominant. One such activity is requirements tracing that helps stakeholders to track the status of their goals. Although various kinds of support for human analysts in requirements tracing have been proposed, little is known about the nature of complementarity when different tracing practices are involved. In this paper, we explore the role of complementarity by considering together the tagging-to-trace (T2T) and learning-to-trace (L2T) activities. We present a novel approach to examining which T2T and L2T practices enhance the qualities of each other. Our approach also uncovers the environmental factors which the complementarity is sensitive to. Applying our approach to the logs of 140 analyst-tracing units offers operational insights into the rigorous detection of complementarity and shows the importance of understanding the cybernetic conditions under which the requirements tracing practices may in fact be complementary.