Automating requirements traceability: Beyond the record & replay paradigm

Requirements traceability (RT) aims at defining relationships between stakeholder requirements and artifacts produced during the software development life-cycle. Although techniques for generating and validating RT are available, RT in practice often suffers from the enormous effort and complexity of creating and maintaining traces or from incomplete trace information that cannot assist engineers in real-world problems. In this paper we will present a tool-supported technique easing trace acquisition by generating trace information automatically. We will explain the approach using a video-on-demand system and show that the generated traces can be used in various engineering scenarios to solve RT-related problems.