Supporting requirements to code traceability through refactoring

Abstract

In this paper, we hypothesize that the distorted traceability tracks of a software system can be systematically re-established through refactoring, a set of behavior-preserving transformations for keeping the system quality under control during evolution. To test our hypothesis, we conduct an experimental analysis using three requirements-to-code datasets from various application domains. Our objective is to assess the impact of various refactoring methods on the performance of automated tracing tools based on information retrieval. Results show that renaming inconsistently named code identifiers, using Rename Identifier refactoring, often leads to improvements in traceability. In contrast, removing code clones, using eXtract Method (XM) refactoring, is found to be detrimental. In addition, results show that moving misplaced code fragments, using Move Method refactoring, has no significant impact on trace link retrieval. We further evaluate Rename Identifier refactoring by comparing its performance with other strategies often used to overcome the vocabulary mismatch problem in software artifacts. In addition, we propose and evaluate various techniques to mitigate the negative impact of XM refactoring. An effective traceability sign analysis is also conducted to quantify the effect of these refactoring methods on the vocabulary structure of software systems.