Requirements Traceability Tools and Issues in Very Small Entities: A Systematic Literature Review and a Tool Proposal

Traceability is a crucial activity of software engineering because it allows stakeholders to track the progress of the project and to rapidly find how software artifacts are linked to each other. However, small organizations often overlook the importance of traceability and fail to capitalize on its benefits. This paper presents a systematic literature review that aims at two objectives: 1) to identify the tools utilized by organizations to support traceability, and 2) to find the common problems organizations face related to this activity. The identified tools are summarized and compared based on their features, while the found problems are also summarized and presented in order of frequency occurrence. Besides, a proposal for a tool that addresses these problems and meets the requirements of traceability provided in the ISO/IEC 29110 standard is presented.