Taxonomic Trace Links: Rethinking Traceability and its Benefits

Abstract: Traceability greatly supports knowledge-intensive tasks, e.g., coverage check and impact analysis. Despite its clear benefits, the \emph{practical} implementation of traceability poses significant challenges, leading to a reduced focus on the creation and maintenance of trace links. We propose a new approach -- Taxonomic Trace Links (TTL) -- which rethinks traceability and its benefits. With TTL, trace links are created indirectly through a domain-specific taxonomy, a simplified version of a domain model. TTL has the potential to address key traceability challenges, such as the granularity of trace links, the lack of a common data structure among software development artifacts, and unclear responsibility for traceability. We explain how TTL addresses these challenges and perform an initial validation with practitioners. We identified six challenges associated with TTL implementation that need to be addressed. Finally, we propose a research roadmap to further develop and evaluate the technical solution of TTL. TTL appears to be particularly feasible in practice where a domain taxonomy is already established