Cross-artifact traceability using lightweight links

Abstract

Much research in traceability has focused on following requirements and features over the early phases of the software lifecycle. There has been comparatively little work on traceability into later phases and artifacts. In this paper, we tackle the problem of traceability across artifacts, including documents and source code, and maintaining traceability links through successive changes. We have developed Zelda, a prototype for associating arbitrary lines in text-based files with a feature map. This representation can be used to link together sections from many types of artifacts and can also contain annotations and notes. Zelda automatically tracks and presents the locations of these links in subsequent versions of the artifacts. We evaluated Zelda using 25 versions of jEdit, (260 KLOC). The overall precision for 419 links across the five features was 0.90 and the recall was 0.73. The average precision and recall per features is 0.78 and 0.69 respectively.