SEKE 2012 Proceedings - Knowledge Systems Institute

While the lab participants li ke the idea of being able to
automatically capture links t o documentation, they expre ssed
several usability issues regarding the current tool
implementation. Some participants prefer more visual feedback
on the status of traceability capture (e.g., a better visual
indicator that the recording i s taking place). One user would
like more “on-the-fly” directions to know what actions to take
while recording. These usability issues can be addressed by
further tool development.
Most of the literature on automating traceability techniques
focus on increasing the accuracy of traceability links captured
to minimize the cost (i.e., the time spent on capturing
traceability links [15]). By holistically analyzing the probl em,
we learn that software engine ers’ aversion to traceability is not
solely because traceability tasks are tim e consuming, but
because of the interaction of cost with social challenges (e.g.,
engineers capture traceability links because of an exte rnal
mandate [4, 6]) or the interaction of cost with the technical
challenges (e.g., captured traceability links quickly bec ome
outdated). Time spent in ca pturing traceability links become s
less of an issue whe n software engineers have a direct benefit
[4, 6]. This is confirmed by our finding where some users are
also willing to spend more time for a greater level of control.
II. CONCLUSION
This paper examined the traceability challenges and showed
that the complexity of the pr oblem stems from multiple
interacting factors that arise from the economic, te chnical, and
social perspectives. ACTS is a novel technique that holistically
tackles these challenges by unifying distributed and varied
artifacts around the architecture, by catering to stake holder
interests, and by prospectively capturing links. The ACTS tool
support is extensible—existing OTS tools can be integrated via
hypermedia adapters and heuristics can be s pecified via
external rules. Our case stud ies have shown that ACTS can
address interacting challenges from different perspectives.
There are several avenues of future work. ACTS can
potentially be adapted to settings where an architectural model
may be distributed among different artifacts or m ay not play a
central role in developm ent. More work is also needed to
understand other interactions be tween the three pers pectives.
For example, it is important to know how to balance individual
versus organizational priorities in capturing traceability links.
We anticipate that these issues can be a ddressed and tha t a
holistic approach like ACTS can aid in transitioning state of the
art traceability techniques into practice.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors are grateful to G. Mark, S. Hendrickson, Y.
Zheng, and E. Dashofy for useful discussions, and C. Leu, J.
Meevasin, H. Pham, D. P urpura, and A. Rahnemoon for tool
development.
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