Improving Requirements Tracing via Information Retrieval

Author Info

Jane Huffman Hayes, University of Kentucky
Alex Dekhtyar, University of KentuckyFollow
James Osborne, University of Kentucky

Recommended Citation

Published in International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE’2003) Proceedings: Monterey, CA., September 1, 2003, pages 151-161.

NOTE: At the time of publication, the author Alex Dekhtyar was not yet affiliated with Cal Poly.

The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRE.2003.1232745.

Abstract

This paper presents an approach for improving requirements tracing based on framing it as an information retrieval (IR) problem. Specifically, we focus on improving recall and precision in order to reduce the number of missed traceability links as well as to reduce the number of irrelevant potential links that an analyst has to examine when performing requirements tracing. Several IR algorithms were adapted and implemented to address this problem. We evaluated our algorithms by comparing their results and performance to those of a senior analyst who traced manually as well as with an existing requirements tracing tool. Initial results suggest that we can retrieve a significantly higher percentage of the links than analysts, even when using existing tools, and do so in much less time while achieving comparable signal-to-noise levels.

Disciplines

Computer Sciences

Copyright

2003 IEEE.

Publisher statement

Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.