Requirements traceability is an important activity to reach an effective
requirements management method in the requirements engineering.
Requirement-to-Code Traceability Links (RtC-TLs) shape the relations between
requirement and source code artifacts. RtC-TLs can assist engineers to know
which parts of software code implement a specific requirement. In addition,
these links can assist engineers to keep a correct mental model of software,
and decreasing the risk of code quality degradation when requirements change
with time mainly in large sized and complex software. However, manually
recovering and preserving of these TLs puts an additional burden on engineers
and is error-prone, tedious, and costly task. This paper introduces YamenTrace,
an automatic approach and implementation to recover and visualize RtC-TLs in
Object-Oriented software based on Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and Formal
Concept Analysis (FCA). The originality of YamenTrace is that it exploits all
code identifier names, comments, and relations in TLs recovery process.
YamenTrace uses LSI to find textual similarity across software code and
requirements. While FCA employs to cluster similar code and requirements
together. Furthermore, YamenTrace gives a visualization of recovered TLs. To
validate YamenTrace, it applied on three case studies. The findings of this
evaluation prove the importance and performance of YamenTrace proposal as most
of RtC-TLs were correctly recovered and visualized.Comment: 17 pages, 14 figure