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),
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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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