Extraction and visualization of traceability relationships between documents and source code

Abstract

Traceability links between artifacts in a software system aid developers in comprehension, development, and effective management of the system. Traceability systems to date have been confronting the difficulties in retrieving relationships between artifacts with high quality and accuracy, and in visualizing extracted relationships in a natural and intuitive way. This research aims to combine several traceability recovery techniques to make up for each other's weaknesses to extract relationships between artifacts at a high-level accuracy and quality. Moreover, the recovered relationships are visualized in a hierarchical rich graphical tree that can be expanded and contracted to help users easily interact with these links and move easily between artifacts and their related artifacts and vice versa. Our preliminary evaluation demonstrated that integration of several traceability recovery techniques can improve the quality and accuracy of retrieved links.