Application of Swarm Techniques to Requirements Engineering: Requirements Tracing

Abstract

Abstract-We posit that swarm intelligence can be applied to effectively address requirements engineering problems. Specifically, this paper demonstrates the applicability of swarm intelligence to the requirements tracing problem using a simple ant colony algorithm. The technique has been validated using two real-world datasets from two problem domains. The technique can generate requirements traceability matrices (RTMs) between textual requirements artifacts (high level requirements traced to low level requirements, for example) with equivalent or better accuracy than traditional information retrieval techniques.

Recovering from a decade: a systematic mapping of information retrieval approaches to software traceability

“…Various probabilistic models have been applied in 29 of the 132 evaluations, including 14 applications of statistical LMs. Five of the applied approaches do not fit in the taxonomy; examples include utilizing swarm techniques(Sultanov and Huffman Hayes 2010…”

Candidate Link Generation Using Semantic Phermone Swarm

“…Here high DiffArr and high MAP value of Semantic Pheromone Swarm implies that Candidate link is generated more effectively using Semantic Pheromone Swarm technique when compared with Simple and Pheromone Swarm [4]. High DiffArr refers that the average relevance of true positives is higher than the false positives and high MAP implies precision is high at various recall values [8].…”

“…For both high/low level document parsing is performed which results in tokens of words. From tokens, stop words are removed and stemming is performed using Porter's algorithm [8]. …”

Recovering Traceability Links in Requirements Documents

“…For evaluation, we employ two publicly-available datasets annotated with traceability links. The first dataset, annotated by Sultanov and Hayes (2010), involves the Pine email system developed at the University of Washington. The second dataset, annotated by Cleland-Huang et al (2010), involves WorldVistA, an electronic health information system developed by the USA Veterans Administration.…”