On-Demand Automated Traceability Maintenance and Evolution

Abstract

After the painstaking process of traceability construction, a substantial evolution of a software system, such as a new major version leads to the decay of traceability links. To date, however, none of the published studies have considered the on-demand update of traceability links. This paper presents an on-demand automated approach for case-based maintenance and evolution of traceability links in the context of different versions of a software project. The approach focuses on the component-to-component features for identification and prioritization of previous traceability cases, which are then used to perform reuse and adaptation of traceability links based on the matches and mismatches, respectively. The adapted (i.e., newly constructed) traceability links can then be verified by a human analyst and stored in a case base. The approach has been validated using an open-source framework for mobile games, named Soomla Android store.