Multifaceted requirement traceability approach to support software evolution

Abstract

Software evolution is inevitable. When a system evolves, there are certain relationships among software artifacts that must be maintained. Requirement traceability is one of importance factor in facilitating software evolution since it maintains the artifacts relationship before and after a change is performed. Requirements traceability can be expensive activities. Many researchers have addressed the problem of requirements traceability, especially to support software evolution activities. Yet, the evaluation results of those approaches show that most of them typically provide only limited supports to software evolution. Based on the problems of requirement traceability, we have identified three directions that are important for traceability to support software evolution, i.e. process automation, procedure simplicity, and best results achievement. Those three directions are addressed in our multifaceted approach of requirement traceability. This approach utilizes three facets to generate links between artifacts, i.e. syntactical similarity matching, link prioritization, and heuristic- list based processes. This paper presents the utilization of multifaceted approach to traceability generation and recovery in facilitating software evolution process. We describe our new approach in traceability called Multifaceted Requirement Traceability Approach (MRTA) to support software evolution. We present the conceptual framework as well as the design of this new approach. We have applied the tool in real case study to measure accuracy of this approach. Also, a controlled experiment using MRTA Tool has been conducted to measure its usability