@Article{DBLP:journals/ese/MaderE15,
  author    = {Patrick Mäder and Alexander Egyed},
  title     = {Do Developers Benefit from Requirements Traceability when Evolving and Maintaining a Software System?},
  journal   = {Empirical Software Engineering},
  year      = {2015},
  volume    = {20},
  number    = {2},
  pages     = {413--441},
  abstract  = {Software traceability is a required component of many software development
	processes. Advocates of requirements traceability cite advantages
	like easier program comprehension and support for software maintenance
	(i.e., software change). However, despite its growing popularity,
	there exists no published evaluation about the usefulness of requirements
	traceability. It is important, if not crucial, to investigate whether
	the use of requirements traceability can significantly support development
	tasks to eventually justify its costs. We thus conducted a controlled
	experiment with 71 subjects re-performing real maintenance tasks
	on two third-party development projects: half of the tasks with and
	the other half without traceability. Subjects sketched their task
	solutions on paper to focus on the their ability to solving the problems
	rather than their programming skills. Our findings show that subjects
	with traceability performed on average 24 % faster on a given task
	and created on average 50 % more correct solutions-suggesting that
	traceability not only saves effort but can profoundly improve software
	maintenance quality.},
  bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, http://dblp.org},
  biburl    = {http://dblp.uni-trier.de/rec/bib/journals/ese/MaderE15},
  doi       = {10.1007/s10664-014-9314-z},
  file      = {:Journals\\JESE 2014 - Do Developers Benefit From Requirements Traceability\\Do Developers Benefit From Requirements Traceability-preprint.pdf:PDF},
  keywords  = {FWF M1268, FWF P23115},
  owner     = {AK117794},
  timestamp = {Thu, 30 Apr 2015 13:09:00 +0200},
  url       = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10664-014-9314-z},
}