Automated Fine Grained Traceability Links Recovery between High Level Requirements and Source Code Implementations

[摘要] Software Traceability has been a matter of discussion in the Software Engineering communityfor a long time. The process of keeping and recovering traces among software artifacts in any system represents a fundamental aspect to properly perform software maintenance tasks and requirements compliance verification. Furthermore, there exist application contexts where this becomesa mandatory process, for instance, banking and healthcare. Software traceability researchers havebeen proposing alternatives to recover lost traceability links in coarse-grained and middle-grainedlevels of detail; however, proposed techniques are not enough to meet the desired levels of granularity in specific critical contexts. In this work we propose a fine-grained traceability algorithmdesigned to recover traces between high level requirements written in natural language and sourcecode statements where they are implemented. We tested our approach in four open-source healthcare systems to trace constraints requirements specified by the HIPAA law, and evaluated the resultsas presented in this paper.

[学科分类] 环境工程

[关键词] Software Traceability;Information Retrieval;Static Code Analysis;Program Slicing;Software Maintenance;Natural Language Processing;Healthcare