Rule-based generation of requirements traceability relations

Abstract

The support for traceability between requirement specifications has been recognised as an important task in the development life cycle of software systems. In this paper, we present a rule-based approach to support the automatic generation of traceability relations between documents which specify requirement statements and use cases (expressed in structured forms of natural language), and analysis object models for software systems. The generation of such relations is based on traceability rules of two different types. More specifically, we use requirement-to-object-model rules to trace the requirements and use case specification documents to an analysis object model, and inter-requirements traceability rules to trace requirement and use case specification documents to each other. By deploying such rules, our approach can generate four different types of traceability relations. To implement and demonstrate our approach, we have implemented a traceability prototype system. This system assumes requirement and use case specification documents and analysis object models represented in XML. It also uses traceability rules which are represented in an XML-based rule mark-up language that we have developed for this purpose. This XML-based representation framework makes it easier to deploy our prototype in settings characterised by the use of heterogeneous software engineering and requirements management tools. The developed prototype has been used in a series of experiments that we have conducted to evaluate our approach. The results of these experiments have provided encouraging initial evidence about the plausibility of our approach and are discussed in the paper.