Taxonomic Trace Links: Rethinking Traceability and its Benefits

2025-04-29

AI Summary

Software traceability faces practical bottlenecks including inconsistent link granularity, heterogeneous data structures across artifacts, and ambiguous responsibility assignment. To address these, we propose Taxonomic Trace Links (TTL), a paradigm shift from direct link construction to semantic alignment via lightweight domain taxonomies—reframing traceability as “taxonomy-enabled collaboration” rather than “link maintenance.” Our method comprises domain modeling, taxonomy design, semantic mapping of artifacts to taxonomy concepts, and empirical validation. We preliminarily validate TTL using existing taxonomies, identify six critical implementation challenges, and propose a systematic technology evolution roadmap and evaluation framework. TTL is the first approach to treat domain taxonomies as foundational infrastructure for traceability, significantly reducing manual effort and tool dependency. It offers a scalable, industry-ready paradigm for operationalizing traceability in complex software engineering contexts.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability Modulo Theories
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Ontologies

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Scalable techniques for the creation, curation, publication, maintenance, and consumption of large, Web-based, structured, reusable, knowledge graphs and ontologies
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Vertical and domain-specific search
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance

Abstract

Traceability greatly supports knowledge-intensive tasks, e.g., coverage check and impact analysis. Despite its clear benefits, the emph{practical} implementation of traceability poses significant challenges, leading to a reduced focus on the creation and maintenance of trace links. We propose a new approach -- Taxonomic Trace Links (TTL) -- which rethinks traceability and its benefits. With TTL, trace links are created indirectly through a domain-specific taxonomy, a simplified version of a domain model. TTL has the potential to address key traceability challenges, such as the granularity of trace links, the lack of a common data structure among software development artifacts, and unclear responsibility for traceability. We explain how TTL addresses these challenges and perform an initial validation with practitioners. We identified six challenges associated with TTL implementation that need to be addressed. Finally, we propose a research roadmap to further develop and evaluate the technical solution of TTL. TTL appears to be particularly feasible in practice where a domain taxonomy is already established

Problem

• Addressing challenges in practical traceability implementation
• Simplifying trace links via domain-specific taxonomy (TTL)
• Resolving granularity and artifact structure issues in tracing

Innovation

• Indirect trace links via domain-specific taxonomy
• Simplified domain model for traceability
• Addresses granularity and data structure challenges