REquirements TRacing On target (RETRO): improving software maintenance through traceability recovery

A number of important tasks in software maintenance require an up-to-date requirements traceability matrix (RTM): change impact analysis, determination of test cases to execute for regression testing, etc. The generation and maintenance of RTMs are tedious and error-prone, and they are hence often not done. In this paper, we present REquirements TRacing On-target (RETRO), a special-purpose requirements tracing tool. We discuss how RETRO automates the generation of RTMs and present the results of a study comparing manual RTM generation to RTM generation using RETRO. The study showed that RETRO found significantly more correct links than manual tracing and took only one third of the time to do so.