Combining textual and structural analysis of software artifacts for traceability link recovery

  • Authors:
  • Collin McMillan;Denys Poshyvanyk;Meghan Revelle

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, The College of William and Mary Williamsburg, VA 23185, USA;Department of Computer Science, The College of William and Mary Williamsburg, VA 23185, USA;Department of Computer Science, The College of William and Mary Williamsburg, VA 23185, USA

  • Venue:
  • TEFSE '09 Proceedings of the 2009 ICSE Workshop on Traceability in Emerging Forms of Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Existing methods for recovering traceability links among software documentation artifacts analyze textual similarities among these artifacts. It may be the case, however, that related documentation elements share little terminology or phrasing. This paper presents a technique for indirectly recovering these traceability links in requirements documentation by combining textual with structural information as we conjecture that related requirements share related source code elements. A preliminary case study indicates that our combined approach improves the precision and recall of recovering relevant links among documents as compared to stand-alone methods based solely on analyzing textual similarities.