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Traceability establishes trace links among software artifacts (e.g., requirements and code) based on whether two artifacts relate to the same part of system functionalities. These trace links are valuable for software development process, but are difficult to obtain manually. To cope with the costly and fallible manual recovery, researchers proposed many automated approaches that help to recover trace links through the textual similarities among software artifacts, such as approaches based on Information Retrieval (IR). However, the low quality and the low quantity of artifact texts negatively impact the calculated textual similarities, thus greatly hindering the performance of IR-based approaches. In this study, we propose to extract co-occurred word pairs from the text structures of both requirements and code (i.e., consensual biterms) to improve IR-based traceability recovery. Specifically, we first collect a set of biterms based on the part-of-speech of requirement texts, and then filter them through the code texts. We then use these consensual biterms to both enrich the input corpus for IR techniques and enhance the calculations of IR values. An empirical evaluation based on nine real-world systems shows that our approach can not only outperform baseline approaches, but also achieve a significant complementary effect with other enhancing strategies from different perspectives.

Thu 13 Oct

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16:00 - 18:00
Technical Session 30 - Builds and DependenciesJournal-first Papers / Research Papers / Tool Demonstrations at Room 128
Chair(s): Christian Kästner Carnegie Mellon University
16:00
20m
Research paper
Towards Understanding Third-party Library Dependency in C/C++ Ecosystem
Research Papers
Wei Tang Tsinghua University, Zhengzi Xu Nanyang Technological University, Chengwei Liu Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Wu Jiahui Nanyang Technological University, shouguo yang Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, Yi Li Nanyang Technological University, Ping Luo Tsinghua University, Yang Liu Nanyang Technological University
16:20
10m
Demonstration
Snapshot Metrics Are Not Enough: Analyzing Software Repositories with Longitudinal Metrics
Tool Demonstrations
Nicholas Synovic Loyola University Chicago, Matt Hyatt Loyola University Chicago, Rohan Sethi Loyola University Chicago, Sohini Thota Loyola University Chicago, Shilpika University of California at Davis, Allan J. Miller Loyola University Chicago, Wenxin Jiang Purdue University, Emmanuel S. Amobi Loyola University Chicago, Austin Pinderski Duke University, Loyola University Chicago, Konstantin Läufer Loyola University Chicago, Nicholas J. Hayward Loyola University Chicago, Neil Klingensmith Loyola University Chicago, James C. Davis Purdue University, USA, George K. Thiruvathukal Loyola University Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory
16:30
20m
Research paper
Not All Dependencies are Equal: An Empirical Study on Production Dependencies in NPM
Research Papers
Jasmine Latendresse Concordia University, Suhaib Mujahid Mozilla, Diego Costa Concordia University, Canada, Emad Shihab Concordia University
16:50
20m
Research paper
Understanding and Predicting Docker Build Duration: An Empirical Study of Containerized Workflow of OSS ProjectsVirtual
Research Papers
Yiwen Wu National University of Defense Technology, Yang Zhang National University of Defense Technology, China, Kele Xu National University of Defense Technology, Tao Wang National University of Defense Technology, Huaimin Wang National University of Defense Technology
17:10
20m
Paper
CIT-daily: A Combinatorial Interaction Testing-Based Daily Build ProcessVirtual
Journal-first Papers
Hanefi Mercan Sabanci University, Atakan Aytar Sabanci University, Giray Coskun Sabanci University, Dilara Müstecep Sabanci University, Gülsüm Uzer Sabanci University, Cemal Yilmaz Sabancı University
Link to publication DOI
17:30
20m
Research paper
Using Consensual Biterms from Text Structures of Requirements and Code to Improve IR-Based Traceability RecoveryVirtual
Research Papers
Hui Gao Nanjing University, Hongyu Kuang Nanjing University, Kexin Sun Nanjing University, Xiaoxing Ma Nanjing University, Alexander Egyed Johannes Kepler University Linz, Patrick Mäder Technische Universität Ilmenau, Guoping Rong Nanjing University, Dong Shao Nanjing University, He Zhang Nanjing University
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