A Case Study on Multifaceted Requirement Traceability

Requirements traceability can be expensive activities. Many researchers have addressed the problem of requirements traceability, especially to support software evolution activities. Yet, the evaluation results of those approaches show that most of them typically provide only limited supports to software evolution to perform requirements tracing and maintaining the established links. Based on the problems of requirement traceability, we have identified three directions that are important for traceability to support software evolution, i.e. process automation, procedure simplicity, and best results achievement. Those three directions are addressed in our multifaceted approach of requirement traceability. This approach utilizes three facets to generate links between artifacts, i.e. syntactical similarity matching, link prioritization, and heuristic-list based processes. This paper presents the result of preliminary experiment that has been applied in case study to illustrate the ability of the approach in facilitating software evolution, especially for best result achievement in term of highest accuracy. The case study results show that utilization of the three facets in generating the traceability among artifacts is promising in term of its accuracy. The initial results show that accuracy can be achieved up to 93% recall and 61% precision.