Identification and classification of barriers and benefits of requirements traceability in project development

Requirements are conditions that a product, service, or process must present and requirements management facilitates this realization. For this, the requirements traceability technique is used for the development of projects and systems and all management of the requirements life cycle. However, the literature recognizes the proven benefits of adherence to the technique, but the plurality of problems inhibits its adherence. Thus, this article aims to identify and classify the barriers and benefits of requirements traceability. For this purpose, it was elaborated a systematic literature review, and for the results´ analysis and codification, the MAXQDA software was used. A total of 15 barriers and 15 benefits were identified. It is possible to verify that both in the case of benefits and barriers, there is a cause and effect relationship between them. In other words, barriers such as “Low flexibility and integration of tools” lead to the emergence of other barriers such as “Management inefficiency”.

Decision tree classifiers for unmanned aircraft configuration selection

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the possibility of lowering the time taken during the aircraft design for unmanned aerial vehicles by using machine learning (ML) for the configuration selection phase. In this work, a database of unmanned aircraft is compiled and is proposed that decision tree classifiers (DTC) can understand the relations between mission and operational requirements and the resulting aircraft configuration. Design/methodology/approach This paper presents a ML-based approach to configuration selection of unmanned aircraft. Multiple DTC are built to predict the overall configuration. The classifiers are trained with a database of 118 unmanned aircraft with 57 characteristics, 47 of which are inputs for the classification problem, and 10 are the desired outputs, such as wing configuration or engine type. Findings This paper shows that DTC can be used for the configuration selection of unmanned aircraft with reasonable accuracy, understanding the connections between the different mission requirements and the culminating configuration. The framework is also capable of dealing with incomplete databases, maximizing the available knowledge. Originality/value This paper increases the computational usage for the aircraft design while retaining requirements’ traceability and increasing decision awareness.

Integrated Traceability Approach for an Effective Impact Analysis

Change is inevitable, software undergoes continuous change during its life cycle. A small change can trigger high evolution because of the ripple effect identified during the activity of impact analysis. However, it depends on the traceability information, which is the connection between software development artifacts. The current traceability techniques lack the breadth and depth to carryout informative impact analysis. We have performed a detailed literature survey of traceability techniques from the year 2008-2018. These techniques are evaluated on the criteria for effective impact analysis present in the literature. The results highlight that no single technique fulfills the criteria for effective impact analysis alone, they can be combined together to achieve promising results. We have presented a hybrid approach that combines four traceability techniques to achieve the entire criteria for an effective impact analysis after careful evaluation. The techniques combined are: Information Retrieval, Pre-Requirement Specification Traceability, Value based Requirements Traceability Technique and Goal Centric Traceability Technique. Our proposed hybrid approach is empirically validated via a field experiment. Results are analyzed for time and effort utilized in maintaining and retrieving the traceability information. The results are promising as the hybrid approach achieves effective impact analysis within minimal time and effort. We plan to extend the validation to real world impact analysis situation via case study.