  Practitioners are poorly supported by the scientific literature when managing
traceability information models (TIMs), which capture the structure and
semantics of trace links. In practice, companies manage their TIMs in very
different ways, even in cases where companies share many similarities. We
present our findings from an in-depth focus group about TIM management with
three different systems engineering companies. We find that the concrete needs
of the companies as well as challenges such as scale and workflow integration
are not considered by existing scientific work. We thus issue a call-to-arms
for the requirements engineering and software and systems traceability
communities, the two main communities for traceability research, to refocus
their work on these practical problems.
