During the last decades, software traceability has been studied in a large number of studies, from different perspectives (e.g., how to create traces and what are its benefits). This large body of knowledge needs to be better explored and exploited by both practitioners and researchers: We need an overview of different aspects of traceability and a structured way to assess and compare existing work in order to extend it with new research or apply it in practice, Thus, we have conducted a secondary study on this large corpus of primary studies, focusing on empirical studies on software traceability, without setting any further restrictions in terms of investigating a specific domain or concrete artifacts. The study explores the goals of existing approaches and the empirical methods used for their evaluation. Its main contributions are the investigation of (a) the type of artifacts linked through traceability approaches; (b) the benefits of using artifact traceability approaches; (c) the ways of measuring their benefit; and (d) the research methods used. The results of the study suggest that (i) requirements artifacts are dominant in traceability; (ii) the research corpus focuses on the proposal of novel techniques for establishing traceability; and (iii) the main benefits are the improvement of software correctness and maintainability. Finally, although many studies include some empirical validation, there is still room for improvements and research methods that can be used more extensively. The obtained results are discussed under the prism of both researchers and practitioners and are compared against the state‐of‐the‐art.

中文翻译：

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软件可追溯性的实证研究：映射研究

在过去的几十年中，已经从不同的角度对软件的可追溯性进行了大量研究（例如，如何创建跟踪以及其好处是什么）。从业人员和研究人员都需要更好地探索和利用大量知识：我们需要对可追溯性的不同方面进行概述，并需要一种结构化的方式来评估和比较现有工作，以便将其扩展到新的研究中或在实践中应用因此，我们已经对这一庞大的基础研究进行了辅助研究，着重于软件可追溯性的经验研究，而在研究特定领域或具体工件方面没有设置任何进一步的限制。该研究探讨了现有方法的目标以及用于评估的经验方法。它的主要贡献是对以下方面的研究：（a）通过可追溯性方法链接的工件的类型；（b）使用工件可追溯性方法的好处；（c）衡量其利益的方式；（d）使用的研究方法。研究结果表明：（i）需求工件在可追溯性中占主导地位；（ii）研究语料库侧重于建立可追溯性的新技术的提议；（iii）主要好处是改善了软件的正确性和可维护性。最后，尽管许多研究都包含一些经验验证，但仍有改进的空间和可以更广泛使用的研究方法。在研究人员和从业人员的角度下讨论了获得的结果，并与最新技术进行了比较。