Using Semantics-Enabled Information Retrieval in Requirements Tracing: An Ongoing Experimental Investigation

Requirements tracing is a central activity for software systems quality management. However, in large-scale evolving systems, maintaining traceability information manually can become a tedious task. To address this problem, several dynamic techniques were introduced to provide automatic traceability links generation. These techniques are usually based on information retrieval (IR) methods which link different artifacts based on their syntactic information. This paper reports an ongoing experimental investigation of using semantics-enabled IR methods to generate traceability links. Our goal is to explore dynamic, accurate, and conceptually rich ways to generate and maintain traceability information.