Real-Time Animator and Requirements Traceability - Using Event-B for Critical Device Software Systems - page 81

5.2.1 Traceability
Goteletal.[ 23 ] have given basic definition of the requirements traceability as fol-
lows:
The requirements traceability is the ability to describe and follow the life of a requirement,
in both a forward and backward direction, i.e. from its origins, through its development
and specification, to its subsequent deployment and use, and through periods of ongoing
refinement and iteration in any of these phases .
Requirements traceability has provided twofold value. First of all, using require-
ments traceability, changes in the context of an application can easily be analysed
for their impact on the code and test cases, and vice versa, which heavily shortens
the time required for software maintenance. On the other hand, increased account-
ability simplifies the verification of a system to its requirements and allows better
monitoring of the processes. Requirement traceability is also used as to advocate
desirable properties of the software development processes [ 37 ]. Lots of problems
are identified during a system development process. Traceability is used as an op-
tional activity during system development due to limited available resources related
to the traceability [ 6 ].
A project team always determines the way in which project development process
should be performed at the initial phase of the project development. Various kinds
of decisions realised for acceptance or rejection about a project plan are made by
a project board, whereas all other technical details are determined by others [ 6 ]. In
this chapter, we have introduced a new technique to use for traceability that helps
to find bugs at the early stage of the system development through visual animations
of a formal specification. All these approaches, methods, techniques and tools pro-
posed for the requirements traceability are useful as long as its adoption decision
is present preferably at the early stages of the projects, and we need to understand
how a decision on requirements traceability is made and which factors influence an
adoption of the traceability. Here, we present the conceptual treatment of these ques-
tions, which eventually provide us with a theoretical lens to examine this adoption
in a systematic manner.
The traceability needs of different stakeholders according to the different kinds
of goals. The requirements traceability presents a connection between requirements
and related artifacts, which are created during the system development using re-
quirements. A set of tools [ 2 , 21 , 25 , 31 ] is used for requirement traceability for the
different purpose during the software life-cycle. However, we have used real-time
animator based on the formal model to trace the hidden requirements of a complex
system. In requirements engineering and elicitation phase it is important that the
rationales and sources to the requirements are captured in order to understand re-
quirements evolution and verification. During design phase, the requirements trace-
ability allows to keep track of what happens when change request is implemented
before a system is redesigned. Traceability can also give information about the jus-
tifications, important decisions and assumptions behind requirements [ 43 ]. Most
important advantage of the requirements traceability is to support validation of the
system functionality according to the stakeholder requirements.