Using tool integration for improving traceability management testing processes: An automotive industrial experience

Despite the high relevance of traceability in software processes, the activities of traceability creation and management are not always adequately supported in practice. The lack of integration between the tools adopted in the development processes is one of the main causes of such an ineffective management, where traceability relationships are still manually generated and maintained. In this paper we present an industrial experience we performed for improving the traceability management in a testing process performed in the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles company. In this context, we carried out a process for analyzing and identifying the main issues due to the ineffective traceability management and proposed a solution for addressing them. We designed and implemented a software architecture for integrating the existing application lifecycle management platform with the tools used in the process with the aim of automating the process execution and the traceability links management. The new architecture was validated by a case study that showed how the integration solution produced beneficial effects on quality attributes of the testing process.