An Improved Approach to the Recovery of Traceability Links between Requirement Documents and Source Codes Based on Latent Semantic Indexing

The traceability links among software artifacts plays a very important role for the maintenance of consistency in the evolution of software product lines. This paper introduces an improved approach to the recovery of traceability information between requirement documents and source codes based on Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and the special features of object-oriented source codes. In order to obtain accurate traceability links, it employs the hierarchical information caused by the inheritance relationship among classes and recovers the traceability links using class clusters. Moreover, it assigns different weights for the terms in source codes according to their degrees of correlation to the documents. The case demonstrates the improved approach, and the experimental results show that it can increase the extraction precision by 3%~6%, compared with that based on the traditional LSI.

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