Software traceability, the ability to relate software development artifacts such as requirements, design models and code to each other, is an important aspect in software development. It yields a number of benefits such as facilitating impact analysis and tracking software changes. However, for companies to reap these benefits, a proper traceability strategy—a plan for how traceability should be managed—needs to be defined and implemented. Existing literature lacks concrete guidelines for practitioners to systematically define such a strategy. In this study, we address this gap by defining a Traceability Introduction Methodology (TracIMo), which is a methodology for systematically designing, implementing and evaluating software traceability in practice. We used design science research to design TracIMo and evaluated it in a case study with an agile development team of a company in the finance domain. Our results show that TracIMo is feasible as it allows incremental definition and evaluation of a traceability strategy that is aligned with the company’s traceability goals and the existing development process. We also report practical challenges encountered when designing a traceability strategy such as defining the right level of granularity and the need for defining intermediate development artifacts.

软件可追溯性，即将软件开发工件（例如需求、设计模型和代码）相互关联的能力，是软件开发中的一个重要方面。它产生了许多好处，例如促进影响分析和跟踪软件更改。然而，为了使公司获得这些好处，需要定义和实施适当的可追溯性策略——如何管理可追溯性的计划。现有文献缺乏供从业者系统地定义此类策略的具体指导方针。在本研究中，我们通过定义可追溯性介绍方法 (TracIMo) 来解决这一差距，这是一种在实践中系统地设计、实施和评估软件可追溯性的方法。我们使用设计科学研究来设计 TraciMo，并在与金融领域公司的敏捷开发团队的案例研究中对其进行了评估。我们的结果表明，TracIMo 是可行的，因为它允许对与公司的可追溯性目标和现有开发流程相一致的可追溯性策略进行增量定义和评估。我们还报告了在设计可追溯性策略时遇到的实际挑战，例如定义正确的粒度级别和定义中间开发工件的需要。