by Alexander Egyed, Stefan Biffl, Matthias Heindl, Paul Grünbacher
Abstract:
Major software development standards mandate the establishment of trace links among software artifacts such as requirements, architectural elements, or source code without explicitly stating the required level of detail of these links. However, the level of detail vastly affects the cost and quality of trace link generation and important applications of trace analysis such as conflict analysis, consistency checking, or change impact analysis. In this paper, we explore these cost-quality trade-offs with three case study systems from different contexts - the open-source ArgoUML modeling tool, an industrial route-planning system, and a movie player. We report the cost-quality trade-off of automated trace generation with the Trace Analyzer approach and discuss its expected impact onto several applications that consume its trace information. In the study we explore simple techniques to predict and manipulate the cost-benefit trade-off with threshold-based filtering. We found that (a) 80% of the benefit comes from only 20% of the cost and (b) weak trace links are predominantly false trace links and can be efficiently eliminated through thresholds.
Reference:
Determining the cost-quality trade-off for automated software traceability (Alexander Egyed, Stefan Biffl, Matthias Heindl, Paul Grünbacher), In Proceedings of the 20th IEEE/ACM Int'l Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2005), Long Beach, USA (David F. Redmiles, Thomas Ellman, Andrea Zisman, eds.), ACM, 2005.
Bibtex Entry:
@Conference{DBLP:conf/kbse/EgyedBHG05,
author = {Alexander Egyed and Stefan Biffl and Matthias Heindl and Paul Grünbacher},
title = {Determining the cost-quality trade-off for automated software traceability},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 20th IEEE/ACM Int'l Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2005), Long Beach, USA},
year = {2005},
editor = {David F. Redmiles and Thomas Ellman and Andrea Zisman},
pages = {360-363},
publisher = {ACM},
abstract = {Major software development standards mandate the establishment of
trace links among software artifacts such as requirements, architectural
elements, or source code without explicitly stating the required
level of detail of these links. However, the level of detail vastly
affects the cost and quality of trace link generation and important
applications of trace analysis such as conflict analysis, consistency
checking, or change impact analysis. In this paper, we explore these
cost-quality trade-offs with three case study systems from different
contexts - the open-source ArgoUML modeling tool, an industrial route-planning
system, and a movie player. We report the cost-quality trade-off
of automated trace generation with the Trace Analyzer approach and
discuss its expected impact onto several applications that consume
its trace information. In the study we explore simple techniques
to predict and manipulate the cost-benefit trade-off with threshold-based
filtering. We found that (a) 80% of the benefit comes from only 20%
of the cost and (b) weak trace links are predominantly false trace
links and can be efficiently eliminated through thresholds.},
doi = {10.1145/1101908.1101970},
file = {:Conferences\\ASE 2005 - Determining the Cost-Quality Trade-off for Automated Software Traceability\\Determining the Cost-Quality Trade-Off for Automated Software Traceability-preprint.pdf:PDF},
keywords = {},
owner = {paul},
researchr = {http://researchr.org/publication/EgyedBHG05},
timestamp = {2015.09.12},
}