Preliminary Systematic Literature Review of Software and Systems Traceability

Abstract Traceability is important knowledge for improving the artifacts of software and systems and processes related to them. Even in a single system, various kinds of artifacts exist. Various kinds of processes also exist, and each of them relates to different kinds of artifacts. Traceability over them has thus large diversity. In addition, developers in each process have different types of purposes to improve their artifacts and process. Research results in traceability have to be categorized and analyzed so that such a developer can choose one of them to achieve his/her purposes. In this paper, we report on the results of Systematic Literature Review (SLR) related to software and systems traceability. Our SLR is preliminary one because we only analyzed articles in ACM digital library and IEEE computer society digital library. We found several interesting trends in traceability research. For example, researches related to creating or maintaining traceability are larger than those related to using it or thinking its strategy. Various kinds of traceability purposes are addressed or assumed in many researches, but some researches do not specify purposes. Purposes related to changes and updates are dominant.