Interaction-based creation and maintenance of continuously usable trace links between requirements and source code

Abstract

Trace links between requirements and code are beneficial for many software engineering tasks such as maintenance, program comprehension, and re-engineering. If trace links are created and used continuously during a project, they need to have high precision and recall to be useful. However, manual trace link creation is cumbersome and existing automatic trace link creation methods are typically only applied retrospectively and to structured requirements. Therefore, they focus on recall and accept manual effort to cope with low precision. Such manual effort is not acceptable continuously. Furthermore, the maintenance of existing links along with changing artefacts in a project is neglected in most automatic trace link creation approaches. Therefore, we developed and evaluated an interaction log-based trace link creation approach IL to continuously provide correct trace links during a project. IL links unstructured requirements specified in an issue tracker and source code managed in a version control system. In the latest version, I L Com , our approach uses the interactions of developers with files in an integrated development environment and issue identifiers provided in commit messages to create trace links continuously after each commit. In this paper, we present I L Com , its most recent evaluation study, and a systematic literature review (SLR) about trace link maintenance (TM). We also present a TM process for I L Com based on two approaches from our SLR. In the evaluation study, we show that precision of I L Com created links is above 90% and recall almost at 80%. In the SLR, we discuss 16 approaches. Our approach is the first trace link creation approach with very good precision and recall and integrated trace maintenance.

A Systematic Literature Review of Issue-Based Requirement Traceability

“…Studies sought to improve the low accuracy of the existing techniques for generating, recovering, or maintaining trace links [25], [36], [37], [46], [49], [50], [54], [56]. Researchers attributed the low accuracy to error-prone links, semantic gaps, and large source files.…”

“…In addition, researchers addressed that handling large source files and stack traces was one of obstacles to improving the accuracy of trace links [46]. To improve the accuracy of trace links, researchers have also studied removing false positives from automatically generated trace links [54].…”

“…Studies have also focused on reducing a considerable amount of developers' manual effort when creating and recovering trace links [29], [34], [45], [48], [53], [54], [58], [59]. Developers spend a substantial amount of time when manually managing traceability relationships or locating bugs [30], [39], [41], [54], [59]- [61]. Developers also spend their time finding test cases relevant to a given bug [47].…”

“…A total of 18 studies linked issue reports to commits. [16], [25], [27], [29], [34]- [38], [42], [44], [48], [51], [54]- [56], [58], [62]. Among them, eleven studies focused on recovering the missing trace links between issue reports and commits [16], [27], [29], [36]- [38], [44], [51], [56], [58], [62].…”

“…Five studies sought different directions. The first one used issue IDs in commit messages to assign interaction logs to requirements [54]. The second one suggested recommending an issue number so that developers could tag commit messages with the recommended issue number [34].…”