Toward an Effective Automated Tracing Process

Traceability is defined as the ability to establish, record, and maintain dependency relations among various software artifacts in a software system, in both a forwards and backwards direction, throughout the multiple phases of the project’s life cycle. The availability of traceability information has been proven vital to several software engineering activities such as program comprehension, impact analysis, feature location, software reuse, and verification and validation (V&V). The research on automated software traceability has noticeably advanced in the past few years. Various methodologies and tools have been proposed in the literature to provide automatic support for establishing and maintaining traceability information in software systems. This movement is motivated by the increasing attention traceability has been receiving as a critical element of any rigorous software development process. However, despite these major advances, traceability implementation and use is still not pervasive in industry. In particular, traceability tools are still far from achieving performance levels that are adequate for practical applications. Such low levels of accuracy require software engineers working with traceability tools to spend a considerable amount of their time verifying the generated traceability information, a process that is often described as tedious, exhaustive, and error-prone. Motivated by these observations, and building upon a growing body of work in this area, in this dissertation we explore several research directions related to enhancing the performance of automated tracing tools and techniques. In particular, our work addresses several issues related to the various aspects of the IR-based automated tracing process, including trace link retrieval, performance enhancement, and the role of the human in the process. Our main objective is to achieve performance levels, in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and usability, that are adequate for practical applications, and ultimately to accomplish a successful technology transfer from research to industry

Evaluation activity in the conceptual phase of the engineering design process

Chapter 4 describes the synthesis and development of a Conceptual Design Evaluation Method (CDEM) that is an amalgam of a number of methods and approaches taken principally from the probability, reliability, and quality domains. Decomposition of design is employed to enable evaluation at design characteristic level with the total design evaluation being achieved via recomposition by means of Conceptual Design Factor Ratings (CDFR) and Conceptual Design Solution Ratings (CDSR). This methodology is next tested, within a controlled design environment, in order that its validity can be assessed. The experimental approach used is described in Chapter 5. The results of this experiment, which uses students along with technical and academic staff from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Glasgow as subjects, indicate that the developed Conceptual Design Evaluation Methodology does exhibit validity within the limits of the experimental environment. It is shown that the CDEM can match expert selection of preferred concept options thus offering the potential of enhancing novice capability and of providing advisory support to experienced designers. The experiment also exposes the problem of objectivity in design evaluation however it is also shown that the CDEM approach acts to mitigate against this tendency by effectively reminding the designer of the benefits of a range of conceptual options. In parallel, the experiment also exposes the limits of human objective evaluation in terms of the complexity of criteria addressed as well as the number of conceptual options considered. Once again CDEM is shown to enable evaluative objectivity to be maintained with increasing complexity. It is also suggested that the CDEM approach is appropriate for a concurrent engineering environment since it displays a capacity to enhance traceability of design decision making. Finally, conclusions are provided regarding the specific outcomes of the described research along with implications for the wider issues of coherent design research strategy and professional engineering design practice

Empirical Study of Training-Set Creation for Software Architecture Traceability Methods

Machine-learning algorithms have the potential to support trace retrieval methods making significant reductions in costs and human-involvement required for the creation and maintenance of traceability links between system requirements, system architecture, and the source code. These algorithms can be trained how to detect the relevant architecture and can then be sent to find it on its own. However, the long-term reductions in cost and effort face a significant upfront cost in the initial training of the algorithm. This cost comes in the form of needing to create training sets of code, which train the algorithm how to identify traceability links. These supervised or semi-supervised training methods require the involvement of highly trained, and thus expensive, experts to collect, and format, these data-sets. In this thesis, three baseline methods training datasets creation are presented. These methods are (i) Manual Expert-based, which involves a human-compiled dataset, (ii) Automated Web-Mining, which creates training datasets by collecting and data-mining APIs (specifically from technical-programming websites), and (iii) Automated Big-Data Analysis, which data-mines ultra-large code repositories to generate the training datasets. The trace-link creation accuracy achieved using each of these three methods is compared, and the cost/benefit comparisons between them is discussed. Furthermore, in a related area, potential correlations between training set size and the accuracy of recovering trace links is investigated. The results of this area of study indicate that the automated techniques, capable of creating very large training sets, allow for sufficient reliability in the problem of tracing architectural tactics. This indicates that these automated methods have potential applications in other areas of software traceability

A plm implementation for aerospace systems engineering-conceptual rotorcraft design

The thesis will discuss the Systems Engineering phase of an original Conceptual Design Engineering Methodology for Aerospace Engineering-Vehicle Synthesis. This iterative phase is shown to benefit from digitization of Integrated Product&Process Design (IPPD) activities, through the application of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) technologies. Requirements analysis through the use of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and 7 MaP tools is explored as an illustration. A "Requirements Data Manager" (RDM) is used to show the ability to reduce the time and cost to design for both new and legacy/derivative designs. Here the COTS tool Teamcenter Systems Engineering (TCSE) is used as the RDM. The utility of the new methodology is explored through consideration of a legacy RFP based vehicle design proposal and associated aerospace engineering. The 2001 American Helicopter Society (AHS) 18th Student Design Competition RFP is considered as a starting point for the Systems Engineering phase. A Conceptual Design Engineering activity was conducted in 2000/2001 by Graduate students (including the author) in Rotorcraft Engineering at the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta GA. This resulted in the "Kingfisher" vehicle design, an advanced search and rescue rotorcraft capable of performing the "Perfect Storm" mission, from the movie of the same name. The associated requirements, architectures, and work breakdown structure data sets for the Kingfisher are used to relate the capabilities of the proposed Integrated Digital Environment (IDE). The IDE is discussed as a repository for legacy knowledge capture, management, and design template creation. A primary thesis theme is to promote the automation of the up-front conceptual definition of complex systems, specifically aerospace vehicles, while anticipating downstream preliminary and full spectrum lifecycle design activities. The thesis forms a basis for additional discussions of PLM tool integration across the engineering, manufacturing, MRO and EOL lifecycle phases to support business management processes.M.S.Committee Chair: Schrage, Daniel P.; Committee Member: Costello, Mark; Committee Member: Wilhite, Alan, W