Interactive recovery of requirements traceability links using user feedback and configuration management logs

Abstract

Traceability links between requirements and source code can assist in software maintenance tasks. There are some automatic traceability recovery methods. Most of them are similarity-based methods recovering links by comparing representation similarity between requirements and code. They cannot work well if there are some links independent of the representation similarity. Herein to cover weakness of them and improve the accuracy of recovery, we propose a method that extends the similarity-based method using two techniques: a log-based traceability recovery method using the configuration management log and a link recommendation from user feedback. These techniques are independent of the representation similarity between requirements and code. As a result of applying our method to a large enterprise system, we successfully improved both recall and precision by more than a 20 percent point in comparison with singly applying the similarity-based method (recall: 60.2% to 80.4%, precision: 41.1% to 64.8%).