Enhancing Software Traceability by Automatically Expanding Corpora with Relevant Documentation

Tathagata Dasgupta, Mark Grechanik, Evan Moritz, Bogdan Dit, Denys Poshyvanyk
2013 2013 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance  
Software traceability is the ability to describe and follow the life of a requirement in both a forward and backward direction by defining relationships to related development artifacts. A plethora of different traceability recovery approaches use information retrieval techniques, which depend on the quality of the textual information in requirements and software artifacts. Not only is it important that stakeholders use meaningful names in these artifacts, but also it is crucial that the same
more » ... mes are used to specify the same concepts in different artifacts. Unfortunately, the latter is difficult to enforce and as a result, software traceability approaches are not as efficient and effective as they could be -to the point where it is questionable whether the anticipated economic and quality benefits were indeed achieved. We propose a novel and automatic approach for expanding corpora with relevant documentation that is obtained using external function call documentation and sets of relevant words, which we implemented in TraceLab. We experimented with three Java applications and we show that using our approach the precision of recovering traceability links was increased by up to 31% in the best case and by approximately 9% on average.
doi:10.1109/icsm.2013.43 dblp:conf/icsm/DasguptaGMDP13 fatcat:mi6eovijwnfsfhb2zeofc5mjca