Best practices for automated traceability

Traceability helps determine that researchers have refined requirements into lower-level design components, built them into the executable system, and tested them effectively. It further helps analysts understand the implications of a proposed change and ensures that no extraneous code exists. Unfortunately, many organizations fail to implement effective traceability. Because manual traces are often created ad hoc, they tend to be inconsistent and often incomplete. Automated traceability methods aggressively tackle these problems by decreasing the effort needed to construct and maintain a set of traceability links and by providing traceability across a much broader set of documents.