Taxonomic Trace Links: Rethinking Traceability and its Benefits

TL;DR

Traceability is valuable but hard to implement in practice due to granularity, data-structure fragmentation, and unclear responsibility. The paper introduces Taxonomic Trace Links (TTL), which create indirect traces by mapping artifacts to domain-specific taxonomies, thereby enabling a common semantic axis for linking requirements, designs, and tests. It provides a detailed idea, context, and an initial validation in a system-engineering setting using the SB11 taxonomy, identifying six practical challenges and outlining a research roadmap focused on reliable classification, taxonomy quality, and tool support. The work suggests TTL can improve traceability feasibility in regulated or taxonomy-rich domains, with a clear path for automation and integration into existing tools.

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

Figures (9)

• Figure 1: Traditional vs. taxonomic trace links
• Figure 2: A Part of an Infrastructure Domain Taxonomy
• Figure 3: TTL creation and usage
• Figure 4: Requirements to Design Objects Tracing
• Figure 5: Wrongly classified 3D element.