Trace links between requirements and software artifacts provide available traceability information and in-depth insights for different stakeholders. Unfortunately, establishing requirements trace links is a tedious, labor-intensive and fallible task. To alleviate this problem, Information Retrieval (IR) methods, such as Vector Space Model (VSM), Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), and their variants, have been widely used to establish trace links automatically. But with the widespread use of agile development methodology, artifacts that can be used to generate automatic tracing links are getting shorter and shorter, which decreases the effects of traditional IR-based trace link generation methods. In this paper, Biterm Topic Model–Genetic Algorithm (BTM–GA), which is effective in managing short-text artifacts and configuring initial parameters, is introduced. A hybrid method VSM[Formula: see text]BTM–GA is proposed to generate requirements trace links. Empirical experiments conducted on five real and frequently-used datasets indicate that (1) the hybrid method VSM+BTM[Formula: see text]GA outperforms the others, and its results can achieve the “Good” level, where recall and precision are no less than 70% and 30%, respectively; (2) the performance of the hybrid method is stable and (3) BTM–GA can provide a number of “hard-to-find” trace links that complement the candidate trace links of VSM.
A context-aware system always needs to adapt its behaviors according to context changes; therefore, modeling context-aware requirements is a complex task. With the increasing use of mobile computing, research on methods of modeling context-aware requirements have become increasingly important, and a large number of relevant studies have been conducted. However, no comprehensive analysis of the challenges and achievements has been performed. The methodology of systematic literature review was used in this survey, in which 68 reports were selected as primary studies. The challenges and methods to confront these challenges in context-aware requirement modeling are summarized. The main contributions of this work are: (1) four challenges and nine sub-challenges are identified; (2) eight kinds of methods in three categories are identified to address these challenges; (3) the extent to which these challenges have been solved is evaluated; and (4) directions for future research are elaborated.
Trace links between software artifacts provide available traceability information and in-depth insights for different stakeholders. Unfortunately, establishing trace links is a fallible, tedious, and labor-intensive task. To alleviate these problems, many Information Retrieval (IR) methods, such as Vector Space Model (VSM), Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and their variants, have been proposed to establish trace links automatically. In recent years, short-text artifacts (or even lack of documentation) become a new trend as more and more software systems are developed abiding by agile methodologies. It makes the effects of traditional IR-based trace links generation methods even worse. In this paper, Biterm Topic Model (BTM), which is good at dealing with short text, is introduced to solve the problem. A hybrid method combining VSM and BTM is proposed to generate requirements trace links. The empirical experiments conducted on three real and frequently-used datasets indicate that the hybrid method can achieve better performance, and the results can reach the "acceptable level" directly.
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