Evolving Requirements-to-Code Trace Links across Versions of a Software System

Trace links provide critical support for numeroussoftware engineering activities including safety analysis, compliance verification, test-case selection, and impact prediction. However, as the system evolves over time, there is a tendency forthe quality of trace links to degrade into a tangle of inaccurateand untrusted links. This is especially true with the links between source-code and upstream artifacts such as requirements–because developers frequently refactor and change code withoutupdating the links. We present TLE (Trace Link Evolver), asolution for automating the evolution of trace links as changesare introduced to source code. We use a set of heuristics, open source tools, and information retrieval methods to detectcommon change scenarios across different versions of software. Each change scenario is then associated with a set of linkevolution heuristics which are used to evolve trace links. Weevaluate our approach through a controlled experiment and alsothrough applying it across 27 releases of the Cassandra DatabaseSystem. Results show that the trace links evolved using ourapproach are significantly more accurate than those generatedusing information retrieval alone.

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