Effort and Quality of Recovering Requirements-to-Code Traces: Two Exploratory Experiments (bibtex)
by Alexander Egyed, Florian Graf and Paul Grünbacher
Abstract:
Trace links between requirements and code are essential for many software development and maintenance activities. Despite significant advances in traceability research, creating links remains a human-intensive activity and surprisingly little is known about how humans perform basic tracing tasks. We investigate fundamental research questions regarding the effort and quality of recovering traces between requirements and code. Our paper presents two exploratory experiments conducted with 100 subjects who recovered trace links for two open source software systems in a controlled environment. In the first experiment, subjects recovered trace links between the two systems' requirements and classes of the implementation. In the second experiment, trace links were established between requirements and individual methods of the implementation. In order to assess the validity of the trace links cast by subjects, key developers of the two software systems participated in our research and provided benchmarks. Our study yields surprising observations: trace capture is surprisingly fast and can be done within minutes even for larger classes; the quality of the captured trace links, while good, does not improve with higher trace effort; and it is not harder though slightly more expensive to recover the trace links for larger, more complex classes.
Reference:
Alexander Egyed, Florian Graf and Paul Grünbacher: Effort and Quality of Recovering Requirements-to-Code Traces: Two Exploratory Experiments, in Proceedings 18th IEEE Int'l Requirements Engineering Conference (RE 2010), Sydney, Australia, IEEE Computer Society, 2010.
Bibtex Entry:
@Conference{DBLP:conf/re/EgyedGG10,
  author    = {Alexander Egyed and Florian Graf and Paul Grünbacher},
  title     = {Effort and Quality of Recovering Requirements-to-Code Traces: Two Exploratory Experiments},
  booktitle = {Proceedings 18th IEEE Int'l Requirements Engineering Conference (RE 2010), Sydney, Australia},
  year      = {2010},
  pages     = {221-230},
  publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
  abstract  = {Trace links between requirements and code are essential for many software
	development and maintenance activities. Despite significant advances
	in traceability research, creating links remains a human-intensive
	activity and surprisingly little is known about how humans perform
	basic tracing tasks. We investigate fundamental research questions
	regarding the effort and quality of recovering traces between requirements
	and code. Our paper presents two exploratory experiments conducted
	with 100 subjects who recovered trace links for two open source software
	systems in a controlled environment. In the first experiment, subjects
	recovered trace links between the two systems' requirements and classes
	of the implementation. In the second experiment, trace links were
	established between requirements and individual methods of the implementation.
	In order to assess the validity of the trace links cast by subjects,
	key developers of the two software systems participated in our research
	and provided benchmarks. Our study yields surprising observations:
	trace capture is surprisingly fast and can be done within minutes
	even for larger classes; the quality of the captured trace links,
	while good, does not improve with higher trace effort; and it is
	not harder though slightly more expensive to recover the trace links
	for larger, more complex classes.},
  bibsource = {DBLP, http://dblp.uni-trier.de},
  doi       = {10.1109/RE.2010.34},
  file      = {:Conferences\\RE 2010 - Effort and Quality of Recovering Requirements-to-Code Traces - Two Exploratory Experiments\\Effort and Quality of Recovering Requirements-to-Code Traces-preprint.pdf:PDF},
  isbn      = {978-0-7695-4162-4},
  keywords  = {},
  owner     = {paul},
  timestamp = {2015.09.12},
}
Powered by bibtexbrowser