Software and Systems Traceability provides a comprehensive description of the practices and theories of software traceability across all phases of the software development lifecycle. The term software traceability is derived from the concept of requirements traceability. Requirements traceability is the ability to track a requirement all the way from its origins to the downstream work products that implement that requirement in a software system. Software traceability is defined as the ability to relate the various types of software artefacts created during the development of software systems. Traceability relations can improve the quality of a product being developed, and reduce the time and cost of development. More specifically, traceability relations can support evolution of software systems, reuse of parts of a system by comparing components of new and existing systems, validation that a system meets its requirements, understanding of the rationale for certain design and implementation decisions, and analysis of the implications of changes in the system.

"Software and Systems Traceability "provides a comprehensive description of the practices and theories of software traceability across all phases of the software development lifecycle. The term software traceabilityis derivedfrom the concept of requirements traceability. Requirements traceability is the ability to track a requirement all the way from its origins to the downstream work products that implement that requirement in a software system. Software traceability is defined as the ability to relate the various types of software artefacts created during the development of software systems. Traceability relations can improve the quality of a product being developed, and reduce the time and cost of development. More specifically, traceability relations can support evolution of software systems, reuse of parts of a system by comparing components of new and existing systems, validation that a system meets its requirements, understanding of the rationale for certain design and implementation decisions, and analysis of the implications of changes in the system."

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, FASE 2012, held in Tallinn, Estonia, in March/April 2012, as part of ETAPS 2012, the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software. The 33 full papers presented together with one full length invited talk were carefully reviewed and slected from 134 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on software architecture and components, services, verification and monitoring, intermodelling and model transformations, modelling and adaptation, product lines and feature-oriented programming, development process, verification and synthesis, testing and maintenance, and slicing and refactoring.