Requirements traceability technologies and technology transfer decision support: A systematic review

Requirements traceability (RT) is a core activity in Requirements Engineering. Various types of RT technologies have been extensively studied for decades. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review from 114 papers between 2006 and 2016 on RT techniques. We summarized 10 major challenges in current RT activities, and categorized existing RT techniques into 6 groups and 25 sub-groups. Moreover, we built mapping relations between these challenges and techniques, and identified 7 potential future research directions. Based on 83 empirical studies, the evaluations for technology transfer are conducted. The main conclusions are: (1) The “trustworthy” and “automated” challenges are the most widely investigated ones, while “scalable”, “coordinated”, “dynamic” and “lightweight” challenges receive much less attention; (2) “Trace link generation”, especially information retrieval-based (IR-based) methods, are the most studied techniques; (3) IR-based methods have the most potential to be adopted by industry, as they have been validated from multiple viewpoints; (4) Seven promising future research directions are identified, which include developing scalable, dynamic and lightweight tracing techniques, introducing new approaches in other disciplines to meet the RT challenges, improving the express ability of trace links, promoting the industry adoption of RT technologies and developing new techniques to support developers' coordination.