Tracing Requirements in an Insurance Software Development Company

Abstract

In literature, a significant amount of studies has been conducted on the topic of requirements traceability. However, little empirical evidence exists that is convincing from a commercial ROI perspective for adopting traceability. This research compares the as-is situation in an insurance software development company with the revized to-be situation in which more advanced traceability mechanisms have been introduced. By conducting an experiment using data from production environment, the authors showed that these mechanisms lead to both an improvement in efficiency and a decrease in effort in requirements management. Although this is likely to increase the implementation effectiveness in the longer term, traceability is a major challenge for the future.