Recovering Transitive Traceability Links among Software Artifacts

Abstract-Although many methods have been suggested to automatically recover traceability links in software development, they do not cover all link combinations (e.g., links between the source code and test cases) because specific documents or artifact features (e.g., log documents and structures of source code) are used. In this paper, we propose a method called the Connecting Links Method (CLM) to recover transitive traceability links between two artifacts using a third artifact. Because CLM uses a different artifact as a document, it can be applied to kinds of various data. Basically, CLM recovers traceability links using the Vector Space Model (VSM) in Information Retrieval (IR) methods. For example, by connecting links between A and B and between B and C, CLM retrieves the link between A and C transitively. In this way, CLM can recover transitive traceability links when a suggested method cannot. Here we demonstrate that CLM can effectively recover links that VSM cannot using Open Source Software

Interactive Traceability Links Visualization using Hierarchical Trace Map

© 2019 IEEE. Traceability links between various software artifacts of a system aid software engineers in system comprehension, verification and change impact analysis. Establishing trace links between software artifacts manually is an error-prone and costly task. Recently, studies in automated traceability link recovery area have received broad attention in the software maintenance community aiming to overcome the challenges of manual trace links maintenance process. In these studies, the trace links results generated by an automated trace recovery approach are presented either in a bland textual matrix format (e.g., tabular format) or two-dimensional graphical formats (e.g. tree view, hierarchical leaf node). Therefore, it is challenging for software engineers to explore the inter-relationships between various artifacts at once (e.g., which test cases and source code files/methods are related to a particular requirement). In this position paper, we propose a hierarchical trace map visualization technique to explore inter-relationships between various artifacts at once naturally and intuitively