In recent years, as the scale and complexity of software have increased continuously, a large number of intermediate products, namely software artifacts, have been produced in the software development process. For example, requirements documents, design drawings, code classes, test documents, etc. These software artifacts contain a large amount of data information. In particular, it is well known that requirements are of great significance for software development, and requirements engineering affects the entire software development life cycle. When the requirements of the software are constantly changing, the software artifacts are scattered and present a fragmented form. In addition, there is a lack of effective methods to organize these messages in a global and unified manner, resulting in a lack of correlation between software artifacts. Therefore, establishing the traceability between requirements and other software artifacts can significantly improve the efficiency of software development and maintenance, which has become a hot research topic in the field of software engineering. The previous literature reviews mainly focus on requirements tracing methods and introduce the technologies commonly used when establishing requirements traceability. Thus, there is a lack of analysis on the technology of establishing the traceability between requirements and different software artifacts from the perspective of the software life cycle process, resulting in a single type of requirements traceability established by researchers. Towards addressing the aforementioned limitation, the paper uses a methodology of Systematic Literature Review(SLR) that has been validated by many scholars. Meanwhile, it takes the requirements traceability research as the core and selects a total of 135 studies in the past 10 years. Taking into the software life cycle and the types of software artifacts account, the paper analyzes the approaches, applications, and development trends of the traceability between requirements and different software artifacts. What's more important is to apply requirements traceability technology in real software development projects to improve the efficiency of intelligent software development. Firstly, according to the various stages of the software life cycle, the paper classifies software artifacts based on text content. These software artifacts are divided into three categories: document-level software artifacts, code-level software artifacts, and product-level software artifacts. This paper mainly investigates and analyzes the research advance of the establishment of the traceability between requirements and document-level software artifacts, requirements and code, requirements and non-specific software artifacts. Besides, the research effect of the existing requirements traceability approaches is analyzed. Secondly, summarize open-source data sets commonly used in experimental design, tools developed by researchers, and application scenarios of tracing techniques in the relevant literature in detail. Last but not least, through the real case analysis in the intelligent software development projects, the paper discusses the effectiveness of the requirements traceability technologies in improving the efficiency of software development. In general, there are still many problems in the field of requirements traceability that need to be further resolved. The paper specifically looks forward to future research directions that are worthy of attention, including types of traceability, tracing methods, and automated tools. Hence, domestic and foreign researchers can conduct further research on requirements traceability. © 2022, Science Press. All right reserved.
