International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering

The building of traceability matrices by those other than the original developers is an arduous, error prone, prolonged, and labor intensive task. Thus, after-the-fact requirements tracing is a process where the right kind of automation can definitely assist an analyst. Recently, a number of researchers have studied the application of various methods, often based on information retrieval after-the-fact tracing. The studies are diverse enough to warrant a means for comparing them easily as well as for determining areas that require further investigation. To that end, we present here an experimental framework for evaluating requirements tracing and traceability studies. Common methods, metrics and measures are described. Recent experimental requirements tracing journal and conference papers are catalogued using the framework. We compare these studies and identify areas for future research. Finally, we provide suggestions on how the field of tracing and traceability research may move to a more mature level.

Requirements traceability (RT) aims at defining and utilizing relationships between stakeholder requirements and artifacts produced during the software development life-cycle and provides an important means to foster software understanding. Although techniques for generating and validating traceability information are available, RT in practice often suffers from the enormous effort and complexity of creating and maintaining traces. This results in invalid or incomplete trace information which cannot support engineers in real-world problems. In this paper we present a tool-supported approach that requires the designer to specify some trace dependencies but eases trace acquisition by generating others automatically. We illustrate the approach using a video-on-demand system and show how the generated traces can be used in various engineering scenarios to improve software understanding. In a case study using an open source software application we demonstrate that the approach is capable of dealing with large-scale systems and delivers valid results.

An approach for the semi-automated recovery of traceability links between software documentation and source code is presented. The methodology is based on the application of information retrieval techniques to extract and analyze the semantic information from the source code and associated documentation. A semi-automatic process is defined based on the proposed methodology.

The paper advocates the use of latent semantic indexing (LSI) as the supporting information retrieval technique. Two case studies using existing software are presented comparing this approach with others. The case studies show positive results for the proposed approach, especially considering the flexibility of the methods used.

Recently, there has been growing interest in formalizing UML, thereby enabling rigorous analysis of its many graphical diagrams. Two obstacles currently limit the adoption and use of UML formalizations in practice. First is the need to verify the consistency of artifacts under formalization. Second is the need to validate formalization approaches against domain-specific requirements. Techniques from the emerging field of requirements traceability hold promise for addressing these obstacles. This paper contributes a technique called retrieval by construction (RBC), which establishes traceability links between a UML model and a target model intended to denote its semantics under formalization. RBC provides an approach for structuring and representing the complex one-to-many links that are common between UML and target models under formalization. RBC also uses the notion of value identity in a novel way that enables the specification of the link-retrieval criteria using generative procedures. These procedures are a natural means for specifying UML formalizations. We have validated the RBC technique in a tool framework called UBanyan, written in C++. We applied the tool to three case studies, one of which was obtained from the industry. We have also assessed our results using the two well-known traceability metrics: precision and recall. Preliminary investigations suggest that RBC can be a useful traceability technique for validating and verifying UML formalizations.

ISO and IEC have jointly developed two Formal Description Techniques (FDTs) for specifying distributed real time systems such as computer/telecommunications protocols. These are Lotos and Estelle. In this paper, a formal method for automated transformation of a Lotos specification to an Estelle specification is presented. The method is applicable to various Lotos specification styles and to various communications protocols of ISO OSI layers.

Our method has applications in conformance testing of such systems and building common semantic model for the various FDTs. In this paper, we develop an algorithm for constructing a 'Data Oriented'-Restricted Behavior Tree T that represent both the control flow aspects and the data flow aspects of the system. Then, we develop an algorithm for constructing the Estelle specifications from T. A minimization rule is also developed to optimize the size of the Estelle specification by reducing both the number of states and the number of transitions.

There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that significant benefits may be gained from augmenting current approaches to software development effort estimation, and indeed other project management activities, with models developed using fuzzy logic and other soft computing methods. The tasks undertaken by project managers early in a development process would appear to be particularly amenable to such a strategy, particularly if fuzzy logic models are used in a complementary manner with other algorithmic approaches, thus providing a range of predictions as opposed to a single point value. As well as providing a more intuitively acceptable set of estimates, this would help to reduce or remove the unwarranted level of certainty associated with a point estimate. Furthermore, such an approach would enable organizations to "store" their project management knowledge, making them less susceptible to employee resignations and the like. If fuzzy logic modeling is to be implemented in industry, however, managers must first believe it to be a realistic and workable option. This issue is addressed here by considering two related questions: one, what expectations do project managers have in relation to effort estimation? And two, what is their opinion of the methods that might be useful in this regard? This is followed by a discussion of the results of two surveys of project managers aimed at deriving membership functions using polling methods, the first using an interval declaration approach and the second using votes on fixed points. It is concluded that there is indeed support in the software engineering practitioner community for the use of methods based on the principles of fuzzy logic modeling.