Traceability-enabled refactoring for managing just-in-time requirements

Abstract

Just-in-time requirements management, characterized by lightweight representation and continuous refinement of requirements, fits many iterative and incremental development projects. Being lightweight and flexible, however, can cause wasteful and procrastinated implementation, leaving certain stakeholder goals not satisfied. This paper proposes traceability-enabled refactoring aimed at fulfilling more requirements fully. We make a novel use of requirements traceability to accurately locate where the software should be refactored, and develop a new scheme to precisely determine what refactorings should be applied to the identified places. Our approach is evaluated through an industrial study. The results show that our approach recommends refactorings more appropriately than a contemporary recommender.