Documenting and exploiting software feature knowledge through tags

Abstract

Knowledge about features and their relations to detailed requirements or code is important and useful for many software engineering activities such as for performing change impact analysis and tracking feature progress. Documenting feature knowledge is challenging, as companies document features and requirements in issue tracking systems (ITS) and work on code in integrated development environments (IDE). Managing feature knowledge over time is challenging, as features, requirements, and code continuously change. Also, managing the relationships through trace links is challenging, as creating links manually is too time-consuming, and recovering links retrospectively is too error-prone. We developed an approach and tool TAFT to document feature knowledge in ITS and IDE continuously. TAFT uses feature tags to indicate relations between feature descriptions, requirements, work items, and source code. Currently, TAFT comprises a dashboard to track the feature progress, a recommendation system to suggest feature tags for specifications, an inheritor to apply feature tags automatically, and capabilities to navigate in feature knowledge. The tool is integrated into the developers' work environments Jira and Eclipse. In this paper, we present details on the tool support for TAFT, and we report on the results of a case study, which indicates its acceptance.