Can LSI help reconstructing requirements traceability in design and test?

Abstract

Managing traceability data is an important aspect of the software development process. In this paper, we investigate to what extent latent semantic indexing (LSI), an information retrieval technique, can help recovering the information needed for automatically reconstructing traceability during the development process. We experimented with two different link selection strategies and applied LSI in multiple case studies varying in size and context. We discuss the results of a small lab study, a larger case study and a large industrial case study