A Visual Approach to Traceability and Rationale Management in Distributed Collaborative Software Development

Traceability and rationale management are utmost critical, especially in distributed collaborative software development projects, due to a lack of mutual workplace awareness and informal coordination among the participating stakeholders. Therefore, this paper presents the rationale behind and implementation of a conceptional design for a novel approach to traceability and rationale management in distributed settings. In doing so, an innovative solution for extracting, visualizing, and analyzing the relationships between requirements and other key artifacts as well as responsible stakeholders is designed based on business needs within the software industry. Thus, the main objective of this paper is to instantiate the underlying conceptual considerations and methodological guidelines with the help of a comprehensive tool infrastructure particularly adapted to distributed settings.