TraceRefiner: An Automated Technique for Refining Coarse-Grained Requirement-to-Class Traces

Abstract

Requirement-to-code traces reveal the code location(s) where a requirement is implemented. Traceability is essential for code evolution and understanding. However, creating and maintaining requirement-to-code traces is a tedious and costly process. In this paper, we introduce TraceRefiner, a novel technique for automatically refining coarse-grained requirement-to-class traces to fine-grained requirement-to-method traces. The inputs of TraceRefiner are (1) the set of requirement-to-class traces, which are easier to create as there are far fewer traces to capture, and (2) information about the code structure (i.e., method calls). The output of TraceRefiner is the set of requirement-to-method traces (providing additional, fine-grained information to the developer). We demonstrate the quality of TraceRefiner on four case study systems (7-72KLOC) and evaluated it on over 230,000 requirement-to-method predictions. The evaluation demonstrates TraceRefiner's ability to refine traces even if many requirement-to-class traces are undefined (incomplete input). The obtained results show that the proposed technique is fully automated, tool-supported, and scalable.