An industrial case study in reconstructing requirements views

Lormans, M.; Deursen, Arie van; Groß, Hans-Gerhard

doi:10.1007/s10664-008-9078-4

Cited by 27 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…Several methods for supporting automatic or semi-automatic recovery of traces have been proposed as a way to address the cost of establishing and maintaining traces, e.g. De Lucia 2007, Hayes 2007, Lormans 2008. An alternative approach is proposed by Post et al (2009) where the number of traces between requirements and test are reduced by linking test cases to user scenarios abstracted from the formal requirements, thus tracing at a higher abstraction level.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Challenges and practices in aligning requirements with verification and validation: a case study of six companies

et al. 2013

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Weak alignment of requirements engineering (RE) with verification and validation(VV) may lead to problems in delivering the required products in time with the right quality. For example, weak communication of requirements changes to testers may result in lack of verification of new requirements and incorrect verification of old invalid requirements, leading to software quality problems, wasted effort and delays. However, despite the serious implications of weak alignment research and practice both tend to focus on one or the other of RE or VV rather than on the alignment of the two. We have performed a multi-unit case study to gain insight into issues around aligning RE and VV by interviewing 30 practitioners from 6 software developing companies, involving 10 researchers in a flexible research process for case studies. The results describe current industry challenges and practices in aligning RE with VV, ranging from quality of the individual RE and VV activities, through tracing and tools, to change control and sharing a common understanding at strategy, goal and design level. The study identified that human aspects are central, i.e. cooperation and communication, and that requirements engineering practices are a critical basis for alignment. Further, the size of an organisation and its motivation for applying alignment practices, e.g. external enforcement of traceability, are variation factors that play a key role in achieving alignment. Our results provide a strategic roadmap for practitioners improvement work to address alignment challenges. Furthermore, the study provides a foundation for continued research to improve the alignment of RE with VV.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Challenges and practices in aligning requirements with verification and validation: a case study of six companies

et al. 2013

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“…Later, other IR methods (e.g., LSI, JS method and Numerical Analysis) have been proposed to recover links between different types of artifacts [4], [5], [9]. In particular, IR methods have been used to recover traceability between requirements [10], between requirements and design artifacts [11], between maintenance requests and software documents [12], and between other types of artifacts [13], [14].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Equivalence of Information Retrieval Methods for Automated Traceability Link Recovery

Oliveto

Gethers

Poshyvanyk

et al. 2010

2010 IEEE 18th International Conference on Program Comprehension

157

102

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Abstract-We present an empirical study to statistically analyze the equivalence of several traceability recovery methods based on Information Retrieval (IR) techniques. The analysis is based on Principal Component Analysis and on the analysis of the overlap of the set of candidate links provided by each method. The studied techniques are the Jensen-Shannon (JS) method, Vector Space Model (VSM), Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). The results show that while JS, VSM, and LSI are almost equivalent, LDA is able to capture a dimension unique to the set of techniques which we considered.

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“…Later, other IR methods (e.g., LSI, Jensen and Shannon method and Numerical Analysis) have been proposed to recover links between different types of artefacts [34], [35], [36]. In particular, IR methods have also been used to recover traceability: between requirements [37], [38]; between requirements and design artefacts [39], [40]; between maintenance requests and software documents [41]; between requirements or design documents and defect reports [42]; between several others types of artefacts (e.g., use cases, UML diagrams, code artefacts, test cases) [43], [44], [45], [46], [47]; and between unit tests and units under test [8].…”

Section: B Ir-based Traceability Recoverymentioning

confidence: 99%

Recovering traceability links between unit tests and classes under test: An improved method

Qusef

Oliveto

Lucia

2010

2010 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance

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Unit tests are valuable as a source of up-to-date documentation as developers continuously changes them to reflect changes in the production code to keep an effective regression suite. Maintaining traceability links between unit tests and classes under test can help developers to comprehend parts of a system. In particular, unit tests show how parts of a system are executed and as such how they are supposed to be used. Moreover, the dependencies between unit tests and classes can be exploited to maintain the consistency during refactoring. Generally, such dependences are not explicitly maintained and they have to be recovered during software development. Some guidelines and naming conventions have been defined to describe the testing environment in order to easily identify related tests for a programming task. However, very often these guidelines are not followed making the identification of links between unit tests and classes a time-consuming task. Thus, automatic approaches to recover such links are needed. In this paper a traceability recovery approach based on Data Flow Analysis (DFA) is presented. In particular, the approach retrieves as tested classes all the classes that affect the result of the last assert statement in each method of the unit test class. The accuracy of the proposed method has been empirically evaluated on two systems, an open source system and an industrial system. As a benchmark, we compare the accuracy of the DFA-based approach with the accuracy of the previously used traceability recovery approaches, namely Naming Convention (NC) and Last Call Before Assert (LCBA) that seem to provide the most accurate results. The results show that the proposed approach is the most accurate method demonstrating the effectiveness of DFA. However, the case study also highlights the limitations of the experimented traceability recovery approaches, showing that detecting the class under test cannot be fully automated and some issues are still under study.

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An industrial case study in reconstructing requirements views

Cited by 27 publications

References 38 publications

Challenges and practices in aligning requirements with verification and validation: a case study of six companies

Challenges and practices in aligning requirements with verification and validation: a case study of six companies

On the Equivalence of Information Retrieval Methods for Automated Traceability Link Recovery

Recovering traceability links between unit tests and classes under test: An improved method

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