Tracing requirements to tests with high precision and recall

Abstract

Requirements traceability is linking requirements to software artifacts, such as source code, test-cases and configuration files. For stakeholders of software, it is important to understand which requirements were tested, whether sufficiently, if at all. Hence tracing requirements in test-cases is an important problem. In this paper, we build on existing research and use features, realization of functional requirements in software [15], to automatically create requirements traceability links between requirements and test-cases. We evaluate our approach on a chat system, Apache Pool [21] and Apache Log4j [11]. We obtain precision/recall levels of more than 90%, an improvement upon currently existing Information Retrieval approaches when tested on the same case studies.