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Evolving software trace links between requirements and source code

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Abstract

Traceability provides support for diverse software engineering activities including safety analysis, compliance verification, test-case selection, and impact prediction. However, in practice, there is a tendency for trace links to degrade over time as the system continually evolves. This is especially true for links between source-code and upstream artifacts such as requirements – because developers frequently refactor and change code without updating the links. In this paper we present TLE (Trace Link Evolver), a solution for automating the evolution of bidirectional trace links between source code classes or methods and requirements. TLE depends on a set of heuristics coupled with refactoring detection tools and informational retrieval algorithms to detect predefined change scenarios that occur across contiguous versions of a software system. We first evaluate TLE at the class level in a controlled experiment to evolve trace links for revisions of two Java applications. Second, we comparatively evaluate several variants of TLE across six releases of our in-house Dronology project. We study the results of integrating human analyst feed back in the evolution cycle of this emerging project. Additionally, in this system, we compare the efficacy of class-level versus method-level evolution of trace links. Finally, we evaluate TLE in a larger scale across 27 releases of the Cassandra Database System and show that the evolved trace links are significantly more accurate than those generated using only information retrieval techniques.

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Notes

  1. Datasets: The Dronology dataset used in these experiments represents an early proof-of-concept prototype and can be downloaded from tinyurl.com/DronologyPOC. More extensive releases of our fully functioning Dronology system with additional artifacts will be released periodically at http://sarec.nd.edu/Dronology.html.

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Acknowledgments

The work in this paper was partially funded by the US National Science Foundation Grant CCF:1319680 and CCF:1647342.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing, DePaul University, 243 S Wabash, Chicago, IL, 60604, USA

    Mona Rahimi

  2. University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, 46556, USA

    Jane Cleland-Huang

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  1. Mona Rahimi
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Correspondence to Mona Rahimi.

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Communicated by: Bram Adams and Denys Poshyvanyk

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Rahimi, M., Cleland-Huang, J. Evolving software trace links between requirements and source code. Empir Software Eng 23, 2198–2231 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-017-9561-x

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