What are the Grand Challenges?

These are open research challenges that members of the CoEST community have identified to help us make progress in diverse areas of Software Traceability Research. The challenges are documented in two papers:
FOSE Paper (link)
Road map paper (link)

The Roadmap paper outlines eight specific goals to be achieved. These include being purposed, effective, configurable, trusted, scalable, portable, valued, and ubiquitous. The FOSE paper examines open challenges from three different perspectives of (1) Quality goals, (2) Processes (i.e., parts of the life-cycle impacted by traceability), and finally (3) Technical aspects. The following graph shows where the majority of research effort has been focused in the past decade.

Research efforts over the past decade have disproportionately favored certain areas of research. documents actionable research goals that researchers are now working to address. We document those open challenges here:

Planning and Managing

Planning and Managing: This area of research is driven by the goal for traceability to be purposed. Planning and managing is at the heart of the traceability life-cycle. It impacts user interactions. Open research challenges in this area are:

RD-1.1:   Develop prototypical stakeholder requirements for traceability, including scenarios of use.

RD-1.2:   Empirically validate task-specific traceability techniques as applied by stakeholders.
Click here if you wish to see current work related to this area of research.

The Community Forms: Through a series of community meetings, CoEST has worked on group projects to identify open challenges and to provide useful resources to the community as they seek to address those challenges. Learn more about the Grand Challenges, tutorial materials, data sets, and benchmarking tools we have developed. Some of these projects are highlighted at the bottom of this page.

All are Welcome: CoEST is an open community and welcomes participation from both academics and industry. Our next upcoming event is the Grand Challenges of Traceability 2017 event to be held in central Kentucky from March 30th to April 1st.