Requirements Traceability Through Information Retrieval Using Dynamic Integration of Structural and Co-change Coupling

Requirement Traceability (RT) links correlate requirements to their corresponding source code and helps in better requirement understanding, reusability and other software maintenance activities. Since a major portion of software artifacts is in the form of text, for finding these links Information Retrieval (IR) techniques based on textual similarity are widely adopted for Requirement Traceability. But it is hard to find RT links when artifacts have less textual description. So, for finding these links indirectly non-textual techniques like structural information based, co-change history based, ownership based are used with IR. However, if the results of IR contain false positives, the combined approach may increase them further. So, instead of directly combining, this paper proposes an automatic technique for RT by first improving the IR approach and then combining it with the non-textual based techniques. Also, we present a new non-textual based technique based on weighted integration of structural coupling and change history based coupling of classes for retrieving indirect links. The results show that our proposed approach performs better than the existing methods which use coupling information complementary to IR.