implemented without consideration of project characteristics like complexity, size, and regulatory guidelines. While mission-critical projects may adopt sophisticated traceability processes, agile software development situations may find that these may constrain their development agility. Therefore, organizations involved in agile development need to create lightweight versions of the general process framework to maintain speed of development without significantly sacrificing product quality. The accompanying table summarizes how an integrated approach provides a synergistic change-management practice when compared to SCM and traceability.

Although we have emphasized the importance of integrating SCM and traceability, we recognize significant challenges in achieving this integration. For example, it imposes a considerable amount of overhead. Also, while the benefits of traceability are typically delivered downstream, the costs involved are incurred upstream in the development life cycle. Therefore, incentive schemes that recognize this issue should be developed to motivate the contributors and consumers of traceability knowledge. Further, the adoption of an integrated practice that deviates significantly from current practices is likely to encounter resistance unless appropriate incentives, tool, and process support are provided. ^c

REFERENCES

1. ANSI/IEEE-828-2005 IEEE Standard for Software Configuration Management Plans. IEEE Standards Association, 2005.

2. Chu-Carroll, M.C., Wright, J., and Shields, D. Supporting aggregation in fine-grained software configuration management. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (Charleston, SC, 2002), ACM Press, NY, 99–108.

3. Conradi, R. and Westfechtel, B. Version models for software configuration management. ACM Computing Surveys 30, 2 (1998), 232–282.

4. Hass, A.M.J. Configuration Management Principles and Practice. Addi-son-Wesley, 2002.

5. Palmer, J.D. Traceability. In Thayer, R.H. and Dorfman, M. eds. Software Requirements Engineering. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 1997, 364–374.

6. Ramesh, B. and Dhar, V. Representing and maintaining process knowledge for large-scale systems development. IEEE Expert 9, 2 (1994), 54– 59.

7. Ramesh, B. and Jarke, M. Towards reference models for requirements traceability. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 27, 1 (2001), 58– 93.

8.Rational Unified Process. IBM, June 15, 2005; www- 306.ibm.com/software/awdtools/rup/.

 

KANNAN MOHAN ( kannan_mohan@baruch.cuny.edu) is an assistant professor of computer information systems at the Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, City University of New York, NY. PENG XU ( Peng.Xu@umb.edu) is an assistant professor of management science and information systems at the College of Management, University of Massachusetts in Boston. BALASUBRAMANIAM RAMESH ( bramesh@gsu.edu) is a Board of Directors Professor of computer information systems at the J. Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University in Atlanta.

© 2008 ACM 0001-0782/08/0500 $5.00

DOI: 10.1145/1342327.1342339

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