Issues of traceability in integrating tools

Traceability, is the ability to discover the history of every feature of a system. It is also being able to find out what resulted from a change request. Traceability has been given steadily increasing importance in the documentation of software projects in recent years. It is clearly a desirable property, but the practical problems of achieving it in a paper-based system used to be thought to outweigh the advantages. With increasing computerisation of larger and larger parts of the lifecycle the benefits of traceability are becoming available. The paper discusses why it is needed; tool integration concepts; tool integration technology; and future directions