link between the artifacts exists. Graphs are especially suitable for development tasks. They allow getting an overview on the links exploratively and are characterized by a high information comprehension ratio. By navigating through the graph it is easy to identify missing links as a hint to create required artifacts. List – Lists represent traceability links in one entry. This entry could include information concerning the source and target artifact and attributes. They are especially suitable when bulk operations for several different artifacts should be executed. Filters and sorting mechanisms allow to handle the displayed information. However, compared to the visualizations described above lists are less suitable to execute project management, development and testing tasks. Hyperlink – Hyperlinks connect linked artifacts and allow “jumping” from a source artifact to a linked artifact. This visualization is suitable if detailed information about an artifact is needed as it allows navigation to artifacts in their native environment. Using hyperlinks solely has the disadvantage that a lot of navigation effort is necessary to get an overview on the link status as linked artifacts are not visualized compactly. Visualizations can be combined to overcome their specific limitations. Technical realization Manual traceability Traceability is realized by capturing traces either entirely manual or tool supported, e.g. as spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel. Though widely applied, this process is cumbersome, error-prone, and often leads to traceability information that is of insufficient quality due to the various involved development tools and the typically very high number of artifacts to be traced. Tool-supported traceability Tool-supported traceability requires that development information that is distributed across a whole chain of development tools to be homogenized and aggregated. The following approaches exist for reaching this state: Homogenization of the software tool environment via an ALM tool – ALM tool chains cover the software development life-cycle and manage all artifacts of the software development process. Many companies have chosen a best-of-breed approach with task management, code management and numerous test automation tools. Companies that choose a best-of-breed approach solve the traceability challenge with requirements management (RM) tools that provide a complete traceability model and integrations for the best of breed tools. A single ALM tool to cover requirements, risk analysis, system design, task management, code repositories, integration, testing and more is a classic trade-off between best-of-breed capabilities vs. a more limited feature, common platform. Homogenization of data via surrogate requirements – requirements management (RM) tools allow