Achievements and Challenges in State-of-the-Art Software Traceability Between Test and Code Artifacts

Testing is a key activity of software development and maintenance that determines the level of reliability. Traceability is the ability to describe and follow the life of software artifacts, and has been promoted as a means for supporting various activities, most importantly testing. Traceability information facilitates the testing and debugging of complex software by modeling the dependencies between code and tests. Actively supplementing traceability to testing enables rectifying defects more reliably and efficiently. Despite its importance, the development of test-to-code traceability has not been sufficiently addressed in the literature, and even worse there is currently no organized review of traceability studies in this field. In this work, we have investigated the main conferences, workshops, and journals of the requirements engineering, testing, and reliability, and identified those contributions that refer to traceability topics. From that starting point, we characterized and analyzed the chosen contributions against three research questions by utilizing a comparative framework including nine criteria. As a result, our study arrives to some interesting points, and outlines a number of potential research directions. This, in turn, can pave the way for facilitating and empowering traceability research in this domain to assist software engineers and testers in test management.