Context: Currently, development e orts in embedded systems developmentlead to a large number of interconnected artifacts. Traceability enables understandingand managing these artifacts as they evolve. However, establishingtraceability is not a trivial task, it requires the development organization toplan how traceability will t into its processes and provide tools to supporttraceability establishment. In practice, guidelines for how traceability shouldbe established are lacking. Therefore, companies struggle with establishingtraceability and making the most of traceability once it is established.Objective: The overall objective of this research is to improve traceabilityprocesses and tools for embedded systems development. In this thesis, westarted with rst understanding the domain and practical traceability challengesand also investigated how traceability tools can be improved.Method: Since establishing traceability is a practical problem, our researchis conducted in close collaboration with industry partners. We conductedqualitative empirical studies to understand which traceability challenges existin reality and designed solutions for some of these challenges. Concretely, weused action research, case study and design science methods for the di erentstudies.Results: Our studies show that establishing traceability in practice stillhas several challenges, the most prominent ones being: the manual work ofestablishing traceability is high; the engineers responsible for creating the linksperceive it as an overhead; lack of tools to enable using traceability; lack ofmethods and tools to measure its quality; no universal standards for traceabilityto be shared and exchanged and it is di cult to measure the return oninvestment of establishing traceability.To reduce the amount of manual work needed to maintain traceability links,we designed guidelines that can be followed by tool developers. We also showthe feasibility of a con gurable and extendable traceability management toolthrough a prototype implementation.Contributions: As part of this thesis, we have elicited persistent traceabilitychallenges in development of embedded systems development. This listof challenges can also be used by other researchers who are interested in thetopic of traceability for embedded systems development. As a rst initiativetowards solving these challenges, we propose important factors and guidelinesfor traceability tool developers and organizations that need to acquire traceabilitytools. Lastly, we have demonstrated the feasibility of these factors andguidelines through a prototype implementation. This implementation is opensource and available for industry to use in their development and for otherresearchers to use for studies and extend the tool.
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