Recovering traceability links in requirements documents

Abstract

Software system development is guided by the evolution of requirements. In this paper, we address the task of requirements traceability, which is concerned with providing bi-directional traceability between various requirements, enabling users to find the origin of each requirement and track every change made to it. We propose a knowledge-rich approach to the task, where we extend a supervised baseline system with (1) additional training instances derived from human-provided annotator rationales; and (2) additional features derived from a hand-built ontology. Experiments demonstrate that our approach yields a relative error reduction of 11.1–19.7%.