TEFSE 2013 - Traceability in Emerging Forms of Software Engineering

Traceability of Emerging Forms of Software Engineering (TEFSE 2013) will bring together researchers and practitioners to examine the challenges of recovering and maintaining traceability for the myriad forms of software engineering artefacts, ranging from user needs to models to source code. The workshop is structured around a series of research challenges that were identified in the 2007 editions and are available on the web-site of the Center of Excellence for Software Traceability. The objective of the 6th edition of TEFSE 2013 is to build on the work the traceability research community has completed in identifying the open traceability challenges. In particular, it is intended to be a working event focused on discussing the main problems related to software artefact traceability and propose possible solutions for such problems. Moreover, the workshop also aims to identify key issues concerning the importance of maintaining the traceability information during software development, to further improve the dialogue between academia and industry and to facilitate technology transfer. Software production for the mass market requires the adoption of techniques and approaches to increase software development productivity. The great pressure to produce has promoted approaches derived from manufacturing, such as component-based development and standardization. The underlying assumption is that the software industry may improve productivity by applying similar approaches to those used in manufacturing. Despite the adoption of reuse, availability of commercial off-the-shelf components, and existence of code generators, middleware, frameworks, and rapid application development tools and techniques, the software industry is still far from the anticipated productivity level. Moreover, software development represents a small part of the software life-cycle as software systems continuously evolve to meet ever changing user needs which may be driven by market pressure, adaptation to legislation, or improvement needs.
In today's competitive market, the pressure to increase productivity results in the tailoring of software processes, especially development and evolution processes to eliminate unproductive activities. Establishing and maintaining traceability links and consistency between software artifacts produced or modified in the software life-cycle are costly and tedious activities that are crucial but frequently neglected in practice. Traceability between the free text documentation associated with the development and maintenance cycle of a software system and its source code are crucial in a number of tasks such as program comprehension, software maintenance, and software verification & validation. Finally, maintaining traceability links between subsequent releases of a software system is important for evaluating relative source code deltas, highlighting effort/code variation inconsistencies, and assessing the change history.