Requirements Traceability: Recovering and Visualizing Traceability Links Between Requirements and Source Code of Object-oriented Software Systems

Abstract

Requirements traceability is an important activity to reach an effective requirements management method in the requirements engineering. Requirement-to-code traceability links shape the relations between requirement and source code artefacts. Requirement-to-code traceability links can help software engineers to know which parts of software code implement a specific requirement. In addition, these links can assist engineers to keep a correct mental model of the software system, and decreasing the risk of code quality degradation when requirements change with time mainly in large sized and complex software systems. However, manually recovering and maintaining these traceability links puts an additional burden on engineers and is error-prone, tedious, and costly task. This paper introduces YamenTrace, an automatic approach and implementation to recover and visualize requirement-to-code traceability links in Object-Oriented software system. The originality of YamenTrace is that it uses all code relations, and granularity levels of code in the process of recovering and visualizing the requirement-to-code traceability links. To validate YamenTrace, it applied on drawing shapes and mobile media case studies. The findings of this evaluation prove the importance and the performance of the YamenTrace proposal as most of the requirement-to-code traceability links were correctly recovered and visualized.