Recovering Traceability Links between Release Notes and Related Software Artifacts

Abstract

Inadequate traceability links between software artifacts can create challenges for developers in tracking the origin of bugs or issues and their corresponding code changes, leading to longer resolution times and the potential introduction of new bugs [5]. When changes are made without proper traceability links, inconsistencies and conflicts may arise between different artifacts [4], such as requirements, design documents, and code, resulting in software development that fails to meet user expectations or exhibits unexpected behavior. The lack of proper traceability links also poses challenges in maintaining software over time, making it difficult to upgrade, manage dependencies, and make changes to the software [3]. Additionally, the lack of traceability links can make it challenging to understand the software's evolution and developers' decision-making process, reducing transparency and hindering collaboration. Release notes are a document that includes details about new features, bug fixes, improvements, and known issues. They help users and developers understand the changes made to the software and their impact on workflows [1]. Traceability links of issues, pull requests (PRs), and commits are important in release notes as they provide context and understanding of changes made in a release [6]. In our dataset, 33% of release notes are not linked with the corresponding artifacts, highlighting the need for automated traceability link recovery in release notes. Additionally, limited traceability links can lead to duplicate bug reports, confusion, and wasted time and effort [7]. Traceability links are crucial for version controlling and back-porting to give a clear understanding of the dependencies within different versions. Without these links, managing releases and documenting changes accurately becomes challenging, potentially damaging the reputation of the software and causing confusion among stakeholders and customers [2]. Our study begins by creating a benchmark to propose an automated traceability technique between release and related artifacts. To collect data, we use the GitHub API to gather information from 10 popular repositories, including release notes, pull-request titles, and commit messages. We analyze textual data and create a benchmark for recovering traceability links between releases and related artifacts such as commits, pull requests, and issues. Next, we investigate the feasibility of automated traceability approaches for software release notes in GitHub using rule-based and information retrieval (IR)-based classifier. To the best of our knowledge, our techniques are the first to automatically recover traceability links between software releases and related artifacts (i.e., commits, pull requests, and issues). This approach can help keep track of changes and improve the quality of release notes by collecting all useful information automatically in real-time. By using this approach, we aim to identify areas of improvement and refine our proposed technique to make it more usable and effective in practice.