Evolving Software Trace Links between Requirements and Source Code

摘要

Maintaining trace links in response to continuous changes occurring in software systems is arduous. In this paper, we present a Trace Link Evolver (TLE) to automatically evolve source-to-requirement trace links according to underlying changes in the system. TLE depends on a set of heuristics coupled with refactoring detection tools and information retrieval algorithms to detect predefined change scenarios that occur across contiguous versions of a software system. Our evaluations show that considering both structural and semantic changes leads to more accurate trace link evolution.