The links between the software architecture and the source code of a software system should be based on solid traceability mechanisms in order to effectively perform quality control and maintenance of the software system. There are several primary studies on traceability between software architecture and source code but so far no systematic literature review (SLR) has been undertaken. This study presents an SLR which has been carried out to discover the existing traceability approaches and tools between software architecture and source code, as well as the empirical evidence for these approaches, their benefits and liabilities, their relations to software architecture understanding, and issues, barriers, and challenges of the approaches. In our SLR the ACM Guide to Computing Literature has been electronically searched to accumulate the biggest share of relevant scientific bibliographic citations from the major publishers in computing. The search strategy identified 742 citations, out of which 11 have been included in our study, dated from 1999 to July, 2013, after applying our inclusion and exclusion criteria. Our SLR resulted in the identification of the current state-of-the-art of traceability approaches and tools between software architecture and source code, as well as gaps and pointers for further research. Moreover, the classification scheme developed in this paper can serve as a guide for researchers and practitioners to find a specific approach or set of approaches that is of interest to them.

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