Cognitive Engineering meets Requirements Engineering Bridging the Traceability Gap

Support for various stakeholders (customer, project manager, system architect, requirements engineer) involved in the design and management of large software systems is needed since frequently, misinterpretations occur already when specifying customer requirements into system requirements. This problem is mainly caused by the various perspectives and intentions of the involved parties that may lead to diverging interpretations during said process. Therefore, the focus of our work in progress is on the requirements engineers when transforming customer requirements into system requirements. There is still a gap to trace design decisions especially at this early stage of the system development life cycle. We introduce a heuristic-based approach in order to make a contribution to bridge this gap. We propose to consider the requirements engineer’s “cognitive perspective” on traceability links by a heuristic-based weighting procedure that can be performed during the design process. We enhance the established relationship or traceability matrix to make it possible for requirements engineers to annotate their informal knowledge to the linkage (i.e., visualized realizations) in that matrix. Keywords-Requirements management; requirements traceability; cognitive engineering; traceability matrix; design