A Framework for Traceability Tool Comparison

The need for automated traceability support has been advocated by various researchers and practitioners alike, as manual traceability is cumbersome and error-prone. Thus, many tools and approaches have been developed to overcome the limitations of manual traceability detection and usage. However, the large amount of available traceability tools is lacking suitable means for reasonable comparison based on welldefined criteria, which in turn complicates the process of choosing the appropriate tool. We propose and discuss a framework for classifying traceability tools, demonstrate its feasibility by organizing three tools according to its criteria, and illustrate how its criteria can be used when searching for a suitable tool.