Tracing requirements and source code during software development

Traceability links between requirements and source code are often created after development. This reduces the possibilities for developers to use these traceability links during the development process. Additionally, existing approaches applied after development do not consider artifacts from project management, which are used for planning and organizing a project. These artifacts can serve as a mediator between requirements and source code. In contrast to these existing approaches, we present an approach that creates traceability links between requirements and source code as the development progresses by incorporating artifacts from project management. In this paper, we make two key contributions. First, a Traceability Information Model integrating requirements, source code and artifacts from project management. Second, an approach for the (semi-) automatic creation of traceability links between artifacts from the Traceability Information Model achieving traceability between requirements and source code during the development process. We identified a catalog of information needs of developers from literature regarding requirements, source code that realizes these requirements, and work done by co-workers implementing these requirements. The presented approach satisfies the information needs of the developers during the development process, while keeping the traceability links up-to-date. Keywords-traceability; requirements; source code; software development; information needs.