Challenges of Integrating Diverse Requirements Documentation and Traceability Practices: A case study in large-scale agile systems development

Abstract

Automotive companies are moving toward in-house software development due to the increasing demand of using software in their products. As part of quality assurance for safety objectives in their software, these companies are required to ensure traceability for requirements and their related artifacts. The requirements and their corresponding trace links coming from different Agile Release Trains (ART) in the company are required to be integrated across these ARTs to ensure quality. The differences in requirements documentation and traceability practices that are being used by different ARTs in an organization poses challenges in collaboration across these ARTs for the purpose of traceability integration. This study is conducted in an automotive company that is applying large-scale agile in their processes. The analysis for this study is based on 15 interviews from representatives of 4 ARTs that are working together in the same department. Further, a workshop has been conducted with 18 representatives from the same ARTs to present the results along with 16 survey responses to validate the results from our interview analysis during the workshop. This study indicates that differences in requirements documentation and traceability practices lead to inconsistencies in the data related to requirements and trace links, which impacts the process of automating traceability integration across these ARTs. Moreover, this paper identifies the differences and presents the reasons behind them. Our findings show that while there are reasons that justify the need for diversity in some parts, there are also other factors that contribute to these differences. Further, the need and suggestions for moving toward more alignment and a shared understanding of these practices across these ARTs, to achieve a common solution for the integration of traceability, is investigated.