The 6th International Workshop on Traceability in Emerging Forms of Software Engineering will host a traceability challenge. The TEFSE Traceability Challenge brings together researchers and practitioners who are interested in applying, comparing, and challenging their traceability tools and approaches on three small/medium size artifact repositories containing different types of artifacts. The main goals of the traceability challenge is to
- help researchers compare their results with each other and
- form a benchmark for the traceability community.
The main task to be perfumed in the context of this challenge will be to find interesting insights related to traceability challenges by analyzing three different software repositories. In particular, participants can analyze the software repositories in order to compare different traceability recovery approaches, experiment new link visualization techniques, or propose approaches to extract the link semantic. The complete list of traceability challenges can be found here. A jury will evaluate the traceability insights and identify the champion taking into account several parameters, such as originality and usefulness.
The three software systems to be used in the context of the traceability challenge are CM1 Subset 1, EasyClinic, and Etour. CM1 is a science instrument developed by NASA. The subset of its repository is composed of 22 high level and 53 low level requirements. EasyClinic is a software system developed by final year students at the University of Salerno (Italy). The application provides support to manage a doctor's office and its repository is composed of 30 use cases, 20 UML interaction diagrams, 63 test cases, and 37 code classes. eTour is an electronic touristic guide developed by final year students at the University of Salerno (Italy). Its repository is composed 58 use cases and 116 classes. The artefact language of the three repositories is English.
Participation is straightforward:
- Select your traceability area (e.g., recovery, visualization, mining).
- Get project data of EasyClinic, eTour, and CM-1 Subset 1 (found here).
- Formulate your traceability questions (you can get ideas looking at the Grand Challenges in traceability).
- Use your traceability tool(s) to answer them.
- Send an email to
by January 26, 2011 specifying the following information in the email subject line:
TEFSE 2011 - TR Challenge: <First name> <Second name> - Write up and submit your 4-page challenge report.
The challenge report should describe the results of your work and cover the following aspects: questions addressed, input data, approach and tools used, derived results and interpretation of them, and conclusions. Reports must be at most 4 pages long and in the TEFSE format.
The submission will be via EasyChair. Each report will undergo a thorough review, and accepted challenge reports will be published as part of the TEFSE 2011 proceedings. Authors of selected papers will be invited to give a presentation at the TEFSE conference in the TEFSE Challenge track. The winner will be given the Traceability Recovery Challenge Award. Furthermore, we would like to encourage all challenge attendees to demo their methods and tools in this session or during coffee breaks.
Authors that are not able to submit a report before the deadline will also have the possibility to participate in the traceability challenge through the submission of an informal report. The deadline for the submission of informal reports is May 7, 2011. Informal reports will have the same format as formal reports, but they will not be included in the workshop proceedings. However, both formal and informal reports will participate in the challenge.