Supporting requirements traceability through refactoring

Abstract

Modern traceability tools employ information retrieval (IR) methods to generate candidate traceability links. These methods track textual signs embedded in the system to establish relationships between software artifacts. However, as software systems evolve, new and inconsistent terminology finds its way into the system's taxonomy, thus corrupting its lexical structure and distorting its traceability tracks. In this paper, we argue that the distorted lexical tracks of the 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 this novel hypothesis, we investigate the effect of integrating various types of refactoring on the performance of requirements-to-code automated tracing methods. In particular, we identify the problems of missing, misplaced, and duplicated signs in software artifacts, and then examine to what extent refactorings that restore, move, and remove textual information can overcome these problems respectively. We conduct our experimental analysis using three datasets from different application domains. Results show that restoring textual information in the system has a positive impact on tracing. In contrast, refactorings that remove redundant information impact tracing negatively. Refactorings that move information among the system modules are found to have no significant effect. Our findings address several issues related to code and requirements evolution, as well as refactoring as a mechanism to enhance the practicality of automated tracing tools.