@Conference{DBLP:conf/icsm/MaderE12,
  author    = {Patrick Mäder and Alexander Egyed},
  title     = {Assessing the effect of requirements traceability for software maintenance.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM 2012), Riva del Garda, Italy},
  year      = {2012},
  pages     = {171-180},
  publisher = {(IEEE) Computer Society},
  abstract  = {Advocates of requirements traceability regularly 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 52 subjects performing real maintenance tasks on
	two third-party development projects: half of the tasks with and
	the other half without traceability. Our findings show that subjects
	with traceability performed on average 21% faster on a task and created
	on average 60% more correct solutions - suggesting that traceability
	not only saves downstream cost but can profoundly improve software
	maintenance quality. Furthermore, we aimed for an initial cost-benefit
	estimation and set the measured time reductions by using traceability
	in relation to the initial costs for setting-up traceability in the
	evaluated systems.},
  file      = {:Conferences\\ICSM 2012 - Assessing the Effect of Requirements Traceability for Software Maintenance\\Assessing the Effect of Requirements Traceability for Software Maintenance-preprint.pdf:PDF},
  keywords  = {FWF M1268},
  url       = {http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/ICSM.2012.6405269},
}