Requirements Traceability for Object Oriented Systems by Partitioning Source Code

Requirements trace ability ensures that source code is consistent with documentation and that all requirements have been implemented. During software evolution, features are added, removed, or modified, the code drifts away from its original requirements. Thus trace ability recovery approaches becomes necessary to re-establish the trace ability relations between requirements and source code. This paper presents an approach (Coparvo) complementary to existing trace ability recovery approaches for object-oriented programs. Coparvo reduces false positive links recovered by traditional trace ability recovery processes thus reducing the manual validation effort. Coparvo assumes that information extracted from different entities (i.e., class names, comments, class variables, or methods signatures) are different information sources, they may have different level of reliability in requirements trace ability and each information source may act as a different expert recommending trace ability links. We applied Coparvo on three data sets, Pooka, SIP Communicator, and iTrust, to filter out false positive links recovered via the information retrieval approach, i.e., vector space model. The results show that Coparvo significantly improves the of the recovered links accuracy and also reduces up to 83% effort required to manually remove false positive links.