Recovering Trace Links Between Software Documentation And Code
Introduction Software development involves creating various artifacts at different levels of abstraction and establishing relationships between them is essential. Traceability link recovery (TLR) automates this process, enhancing software quality by aiding tasks like maintenance and evolution. However, automating TLR is challenging due to semantic gaps resulting from different levels of abstraction. While automated TLR approaches exist for requirements and code, architecture documentation lacks tailored solutions, hindering the preservation of architecture knowledge and design decisions.
Methods This paper presents our approach TransArC for TLR between architecture documentation and code, using component-based architecture models as intermediate artifacts to bridge the semantic gap. We create transitive trace links by combining the existing approach ArDoCo for linking architecture documentation to models with our novel approach ArCoTL for linking architecture models to code.
Results We evaluate our approaches with five open-source projects, comparing our results to baseline approaches. The model-to-code TLR approach achieves an average F1-score of 0.98, while the documentation-to-code TLR approach achieves a promising average F1-score of 0.82, significantly outperforming baselines.
Conclusion Combining two specialized approaches with an intermediate artifact shows promise for bridging the semantic gap. In future research, we will explore further possibilities for such transitive approaches.
Fri 19 AprDisplayed time zone: Lisbon change
16:00 - 17:30 | Requirements 2Software Engineering in Society / Research Track / Software Engineering in Practice at Maria Helena Vieira da Silva Chair(s): Fabio Palomba University of Salerno | ||
16:00 18mTalk | Recovering Trace Links Between Software Documentation And Code Research Track Jan Keim Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Sophie Corallo Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Dominik Fuchß Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Tobias Hey Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Tobias Telge Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Anne Koziolek Karlsruhe Institute of Technology Link to publication DOI Pre-print | ||
16:18 18mTalk | TRIAD: Automated Traceability Recovery based on Biterm-enhanced Deduction of Transitive Links among Artifacts Research Track Hui Gao Nanjing University, Hongyu Kuang Nanjing University, Wesley Assunção North Carolina State University, Christoph Mayr-Dorn JOHANNES KEPLER UNIVERSITY LINZ, Guoping Rong Nanjing University, He Zhang Nanjing University, Xiaoxing Ma State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Alexander Egyed Johannes Kepler University Linz Pre-print | ||
16:36 18mTalk | Towards Engineering Fair and Equitable Software Systems for Managing Low-Altitude Airspace Authorizations Software Engineering in Society Usman Gohar Dept. of Computer Science, Iowa State University, Michael Hunter Iowa State University, Agnieszka Marczak-Czajka University of Notre Dame, Robyn Lutz Iowa State University, Myra Cohen Iowa State University, Jane Cleland-Huang University of Notre Dame DOI Pre-print | ||
16:54 18mTalk | What Can Requirements Engineering Do for Emerging System of Systems? Case of Smart Local Energy Software Engineering in Society Ruzanna Chitchyan University of Bristol | ||
17:12 18mTalk | API Governance at Scale Software Engineering in Practice Mak Ahmad UC Davis, JJ Geewax Meta, Andrew Macvean Google, Inc., David Karger MIT, Kwan-Liu Ma UC Davis |