Using Terminology Extraction to Improve Traceability from Formal Models to Textual Requirements

Abstract

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A study to support agile methods more effectively through traceability

“…However, current traceability approaches are based precisely on a complete requirements specification document. As an example, the acquisition of traces between requirements and design as in [10,13,22,63], or the automation of traceability practices as in [15,16,23,48]. Thus, the need to provide a new and specific approach for traceability in agile processes seems to be a fundamental issue.…”

“…A great majority of the existing traceability models and methodologies, such as [10,13,38,49,63], assume that one of the outputs of the development process is a formally structured requirements specification. Even more, the requirements specification would be an early output of the process.…”

“…User-definable traceability types, as opposed to merely pre-defined types, greatly facilitate methodical trace acquisition and maintenance processes, because of the strong semantics they provide. At present, some approaches manage to automate a large number of traceability tasks, but they do not solve the issue under discussion, since they use mainly natural language processing, or information retrieval techniques, as in [13,15,25,24,66,70,71].…”

“…To mention some, the authors of [67] demonstrate the ability to automate traceability relations generation at reasonable levels of recall and precision. In [13] syntactic analysis of text documents written in natural language is used to manage traceability links; these links are between the initial software requirements and the formal object representations resulting from the modeling processes. Reference [25] focuses on automatically generating dependency links between requirements, design artifacts, test cases and source code.…”

“…Then, a rule such as satisfies_tests will ensure a correct semantics for the relationship between storytests and code. In this sense, the linkage rules provided in TmM are, therefore, less constrained than in other approaches, such as the already discussed [13,15,25,24,66,70,71]. TmM widely makes it possible the creation of specific rules for an agilefeatured project, as it is the case of SDD projects.…”