Workshop on Addressing the Grand Challenges of Traceability

Workshop on Addressing the Grand Challenges of Traceability Summary This proposal requests support to run a workshop addressing the grand challenges of traceability. This would be the second in a series of two planned workshops. The first workshop, which is already partially funded by NASA, will draw together approximately twelve traceability experts from academia and industry to identify and formulate the grand challenges oftraceability. The primary deliverable ofthis first workshop will be a report documenting these grand challenges. This proposal requests funding for the second workshop for which an open call will be made for practitioners and researchers to specifically address the previously defined grand challenges, document the state of art and state of practice for each one, and formulate a visionary roadmap for traceability research. Experts from other fields such as human computer interaction, information retrieval, and artificial intelligence will be invited to participate in the workshop to provide cross-pollination of ideas. Intellectual merit Requirements traceability provides crucial support for software engineers as they develop and maintain software systems. It involves tasks related to developing, assessing, maintaining, and utilizing requirements traceability matrices. Unfortunately the profound lack of tool support for this laborious task often results in inaccurate and missing traces and subsequent difficulties in validating requirements, supporting impact analysis, and other critical tasks. These problems are especially visible in safety-critical applications. The objective of the proposed workshop is to evaluate each of the grand challenges and create a clear roadmap for future research. Topics such as automated trace generation; maintenance of impacted artifacts; automated data extraction methods; traceability assessment methods; visualization; process improvement; and usability issues will be addressed. Broader Impact The proposed workshop and related activities will foster the exchange of ideas between academia and industry, with the intention of increasing collaboration on traceability related projects and promoting technology transfer to industry. The workshop will strengthen the community oftraceability researchers through encouraging student involvement and by providing a forum for the exchange of ideas. Finally the "Grand Challenges" and "Traceability Roadmaps" produced as a workshop deliverable will clearly define current problems and future challenges, and identify open issues that will encourage ongoing research in this area. TP/6582514