@MastersThesis{Ghabi2010,
  author    = {Achraf Ghabi},
  title     = {Automatic Approach to Validating Requirement-to-Code Traces},
  school    = {Johannes Kepler University (JKU), Linz, Austria},
  year      = {2010},
  abstract  = {Model traceability is a research field dedicated to establishing and
	maintaining the mapping between requirements, software models, documentation,
	and code. It is considered as a sign for process maturity and products
	quality. And, it is mandated by many standards, such as: NASA Software
	Assurance Standard and U.K. Office of Government Commerce. Traces
	between requirements and code (requirement-to-code) reveal where
	requirements are implemented. Such traces are essential for code
	understanding and change management. Unfortunately, the handling
	of traces is highly error prone, on one side due to the informal
	nature of requirements and on another due to the continuous evolution
	of the code. Incorrect traces are not only less useful for a stakeholder
	but also misleading in many cases. The correctness of traces is crucial
	to exploit their usefulness. This thesis introduces a novel method
	for validating requirements-to-code traces by considering the calling
	relationships within the source code. As input, the approach requires
	existing requirements-to-code traces and as output it identifies
	potential errors in the input. The approach does this by investigating
	patterns of traces together with patterns of calling relationships.
	Our observation is that code that traces to a particular requirement
	is connected through calling relationships and we exploit this connectivity
	for validating traceability. The empirical evaluation on four case
	study systems covering 150 KLOC and 59 sample requirements demonstrates
	that our approach detects most errors with > 90% correctness and
	the quality of validated traces decreases very slowly with less input
	quality. Our approach is fully automated, tool supported, and efficient
	(linear computational complexity with input quantity with validation
	times < 3 seconds on the largest case study).},
  file      = {:MSc Theses\\2010 Achraf Ghabi\\Achraf Ghabi - Automatic Approach to Validating Requirement-to-Code Traces-preprint.pdf:PDF},
  owner     = {AK117794},
  timestamp = {2015.09.22},
}