Automating Traceability in Agile Software Development

Abstract: In order for Software Configuration Management (SCM) tools to provide good traceability links there is usually a great deal of manual effort required. The result is that data becomes unreliable, inconsistent and in many cases nonexistent. The main focus in previous research in this area has been to make general tools which can provide traceability between any type of configuration artifact in any project. The focus of this report is instead to go back to the core of software development, i.e. the code and the developers, and produce a prototype of a tool providing traceability related to the code. Instead of making a one-size-fits-all focus is on agile projects using version control tools and the idea is to reduce developer workload by automating traceability link generation and maintenance based on state analysis of issues and parsing of previous commit messages. In this report the current state of traceability in a few companies is analyzed, a prototype is developed and then reviewed by several industry experts and finally a set of related traceability links which could be automatically generated and maintained is presented as a part of a framework to define traceability links that can be automated. The prototype covers traceability links between code and tickets and the framework is then used to expand on automated traceability generation to find new areas for improvement.