Daily Knowledge Valuation in Organizations

7Traceability of Communications in Software Design

7.1. Introduction

The role of traceability in software engineering was first recognized in the 1960s [NAU 68]. Around this time it become necessary to keep track of software design techniques along the process of software engineering. However, it than become necessary to adopt a systematic traceability approach, which was defined in the 1990s by Ramesh et al. [RAM 93, GOT 94]. Ramesh and Edwards explain traceability benefits to improve the performance of software maintenance and evolution. The potential uses of the data of traceability will be, for example, for different project actors, head of project, developers, customers, etc. The traces that we speak of mainly concern the following:

1. – linking concept to requirements;
2. – conflicts and problems in software architecture related to requirements;
3. – respect of quality process and criteria;

1. – generic components for reuse in future products;
2. – traces of the development of the product.

Currently, software engineering projects are complex, take a long time to develop and need contributions from several actors. Different documents are produced during the development of these projects: requirements, functional specifications, software architecture, test definitions and results, actors interactions, etc. These documents are used and produced by several actors and over a long time. Project management tools such as MSProject and Scrum-Agile are used; these documents are generally ...