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

Paul Hübner,Barbara Paech

doi:10.1007/s10664-020-09831-w

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, ILCom, 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 ILCom, its most recent evaluation study, and a systematic literature review (SLR) about trace link maintenance (TM). We also present a TM process for ILCom based on two approaches from our SLR. In the evaluation study, we show that precision of ILCom 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.

Highlights

Existing trace link creation approaches between requirements and code are most frequently based on information retrieval (IR) and on structured requirements, such as use cases (Borg et al 2014; Cleland-Huang et al 2014)
In the systematic literature review (SLR), we answer the general research question: Which approaches do exist for trace link maintenance and what are their characteristics? Overall we identified 16 distinct TM approaches and assessed them with regard to their integration with I LCom
We summarize the notations for the different link creations (IR, IL, ComL, and I LCom) and improvement techniques as used in the subsequent description of the study: IR IL ComL I LCom denotes the approach for link creation by information retrieval and IRi denotes that source code structure-based improvement techniques from the third step of our approach were applied

Summary

Introduction

Existing trace link creation approaches between requirements and code are most frequently based on information retrieval (IR) and on structured requirements, such as use cases (Borg et al 2014; Cleland-Huang et al 2014) These approaches mostly focus on the optimization of recall (Borg et al 2014). To evaluate approaches for trace link creation (Borg et al 2014; Cleland-Huang et al 2014), a gold standard which consists of the set of all correct trace links for a given set of artefacts is important To create such a gold standard, it is necessary to manually check whether trace links exist for each pair of artefacts. Precision is the fraction of found links which are correct and recall is the fraction of correct links which have been found

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