Traceability Link Evolution Management with Incremental Latent Semantic Indexing

As dynamic as software development, software artifacts are also constantly in evolution. As a result, traceability links among them are also changing over time. Even though traceability link recovery (TLR) tools have been successful in generating traceability relations among documentation and source code, they work on a snapshot of the artifacts at a particular time. Traceability link evolution has not been well-addressed. This hinders developers from having good understanding of the evolution of software. In this paper, we describe our incremental approach to traceability link recovery and management with the latent semantic indexing method. To complement with that approach, we suggest the use of the versioned hypermedia technology (VH). Traceability links can be consistently stored, versioned, and managed across different types of software artifacts.