TIRT: A Traceability Information Retrieval Tool for Software Product Lines Projects

Software Product Line has proven to be an effective methodology for developing a diversity of software products at lower costs, in shorter time, and with higher quality. However, the adoption and maintenance of traceability in the context of product lines is considered a difficult task, due to the large number and heterogeneity of assets developed during product line engineering. Furthermore, the manual creation and management of traceability relations is difficult, error-prone, time consuming and complex. In this sense, Traceability Information Retrieval Tool (TIRT) was proposed in order to mitigate the maintenance traceability problem. An experimental study was performed in order to identify the viability of the proposed tool and traceability scenarios.