Combining VSM and BTM to improve requirements trace links generation

Abstract

Trace links between software artifacts provide available traceability information and in-depth insights for different stakeholders. Unfortunately, establishing trace links is a fallible, tedious, and labor-intensive task. To alleviate these problems, many Information Retrieval (IR) methods, such as Vector Space Model (VSM), Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and their variants, have been proposed to establish trace links automatically. In recent years, short-text artifacts (or even lack of documentation) become a new trend as more and more software systems are developed abiding by agile methodologies. It makes the effects of traditional IR-based trace links generation methods even worse. In this paper, Biterm Topic Model (BTM), which is good at dealing with short text, is introduced to solve the problem. A hybrid method combining VSM and BTM is proposed to generate requirements trace links. The empirical experiments conducted on three real and frequently-used datasets indicate that the hybrid method can achieve better performance, and the results can reach the "acceptable level" directly.