Traceability patterns for effective project management

Abstract

The most overwhelming challenges in the software system development process today, are requirement management and tracing. This has got deeper consequences to overall project management and success. Key requirement attributes like time, risk and cost are often neglected. In this work we contend that through traceability patterns, organizations can effectively trace and manage requirements more effectively. In our approach, we describe two closely related subjects: traceability profile and traceability patterns. A traceability profile allows traceability to be represented in the UML and the patterns are a novel intuitive component that emerges from traceability activities. In this work, we specifically investigated how requirements traceability patterns can enhance project management so as to improve the understandability, reusability and communication of traceability practices. We simulate our approach with a traceability management prototype. To establish the effectiveness of this work, we tested our approach using Human Computer Interaction evaluation methods using two levels of users.