Recovering traceability links between code and specification through domain model extraction

Abstract

Requirements traceability is an extremely important aspect of software development and especially of maintenance. Efficient maintaining of traceability links between high-level requirements specification and low-level implementation is hindered by many problems. In this paper, we propose a method for automated recovery of links between parts of the textual requirement specification and the source code of implementation. The described method is based on a method allowing extraction of a prototype domain model from plain text requirements specification. The proposed method is evaluated on two non-trivial examples. The performed experiments show that our method is able to link requirements with source code with the accuracy of F1 = 58 - 61%.