Complementarity between activities reveals that doing any one of them increases the returns to doing the others. In other words, complementarity leads to the synergistic effect that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Identifying and exploiting complementarity can benefit many cybernetic activities, where human–machine interactions are inherent and dominant. One such activity is requirements tracing that helps stakeholders to track the status of their goals. Although various kinds of support for human analysts in requirements tracing have been proposed, little is known about the nature of complementarity when different tracing practices are involved. In this paper, we explore the role of complementarity by considering together the tagging-to-trace (T2T) and learning-to-trace (L2T) activities. We present a novel approach to examining which T2T and L2T practices enhance the qualities of each other. Our approach also uncovers the environmental factors which the complementarity is sensitive to. Applying our approach to the logs of 140 analyst-tracing units offers operational insights into the rigorous detection of complementarity and shows the importance of understanding the cybernetic conditions under which the requirements tracing practices may in fact be complementary.

中文翻译：

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需求跟踪中的互补性

活动之间的互补性表明，进行任何一项活动都会增加其他活动的回报。换句话说，互补性导致整体大于其各部分之和的协同效应。识别和利用互补性可以使许多控制论活动受益，在这些活动中，人机交互是固有的并且占主导地位。一种这样的活动是需求跟踪，它可以帮助利益相关者跟踪其目标的状态。尽管已经提出了对人类分析人员进行需求跟踪的各种支持，但是当涉及不同的跟踪实践时，人们对互补性的本质知之甚少。在本文中，我们通过同时考虑标记到跟踪（T2T）和学习到跟踪（L2T）活动来探索互补的作用。我们提出了一种新颖的方法来检查哪些T2T和L2T做法可以提高彼此的素质。我们的方法还揭示了互补性敏感的环境因素。将我们的方法应用于140个分析人员追踪单位的日志中，可提供对严格检测互补性的操作见解，并显示了了解控制论条件的重要性，在该条件下需求追踪实践实际上可能是互补的。