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How do we trace requirements: an initial study of analyst behavior in trace validation tasks

Authors:

Jane Huffman Hayes,

Jeff HoldenAuthors Info & Claims

CHASE '11: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering

Pages 32 - 39

https://doi.org/10.1145/1984642.1984648

Published: 21 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Traceability recovery is a tedious, error-prone, person-power intensive task, even if aided by automated traceability tools. Human analysts must vet candidate traceability links retrieved by such tools and must often go looking for links that such tools fail to locate as they build a traceability matrix. This paper examines a research version of the traceability tool REquirements TRacing On target (RETRO) that logs analyst actions. We examine the user logs in order to understand how analysts work on traceability recovery tasks. Such information is a pre-requisite to understanding how to better design traceability tools to best utilize analyst time while developing a high quality final traceability matrix.

References

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Antoniol, G., Canfora, G., Casazza, G., De Lucia, A. and Merlo, E. 2002. Recovering traceability links between code and documentation. Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on. 28, 10 (2002), 970--983.

Digital Library

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Cleland-Huang, J., Chang, C.K., Sethi, G., Javvaji, K., Hu, H. and Xia, J. 2002. Automating Speculative Queries through Event-Based Requirements Traceability. Requirements Engineering, IEEE International Conference on (Los Alamitos, CA, USA, 2002), 289.

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Cuddeback, D. Automated Requirements Traceability: the Study of Human Analysts. Ph.D. Thesis, Cal Poly, CA., 2010.

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Cuddeback, D., Dekhtyar, A., Hayes, J. H., Holden, J. and Kong, W. New Ideas and Emerging Results Track: Towards Overcoming Human Analyst Fallibility in the Requirements Tracing Process. Accepted, ICSE 2011 NIER track.

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Cuddeback, D., Dekhtyar, A. and Hayes, J. 2010. Automated Requirements Traceability: The Study of Human Analysts. Proceedings of the 2010 18th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (Washington, DC, USA, 2010), 231--240.

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Dekhtyar, A., Hayes, J. H. and Larsen, J. 2007. Make the Most of Your Time: How Should the Analyst Work with Automated Traceability Tools? Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Predictor Models in Software Engineering (Washington, DC, USA, 2007), 4--.

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Hayes, J. H. and Dekhtyar, A. 2005. Humans in the traceability loop: can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em. Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Traceability in emerging forms of software engineering (New York, NY, USA, 2005), 20--23.

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Hayes, J. H., Dekhtyar, A. and Osborne, J. 2003. Improving Requirements Tracing via Information Retrieval. Proceedings of the 11th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering (Washington, DC, USA, 2003), 138--.

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Hayes, J. H., Dekhtyar, A. and Sundaram, S. 2005. Text mining for software engineering: how analyst feedback impacts final results. Proceedings of the 2005 international workshop on Mining software repositories (New York, NY, USA, 2005), 1--5.

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Hayes, J. H., Dekhtyar, A. and Sundaram, S. K. 2006. Advancing Candidate Link Generation for Requirements Tracing: The Study of Methods. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 32, 1 (2006), 4--19.

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Hayes, J. H., Dekhtyar, A., Sundaram, S. K., Holbrook, E. A., Vadlamudi, S. and April, A. 2007. REquirements TRacing On target (RETRO): improving software maintenance through traceability recovery. ISSE. 3, 3 (2007), 193--202.

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Cited By

Hammoudi MMayr-Dorn CMashkoor AEgyed AHung CHong JBechini ASong E(2021)On the effect of incompleteness to check requirement-to-method tracesProceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3412841.3442021(1465-1474)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3412841.3442021
Hammoudi MMayr-Dorn CMashkoor AEgyed A(2021)TraceRefiner: An Automated Technique for Refining Coarse-Grained Requirement-to-Class Traces2021 28th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC)10.1109/APSEC53868.2021.00009(12-21)Online publication date: Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/APSEC53868.2021.00009
Demi SSanchez‐Gordon MColomo‐Palacios R(2021)What have we learnt from the challenges of (semi‐) automated requirements traceability? A discussion on blockchain applicabilityIET Software10.1049/sfw2.1203515:6(391-411)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2021
https://doi.org/10.1049/sfw2.12035
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

How do we trace requirements: an initial study of analyst behavior in trace validation tasks
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software development techniques

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHASE '11: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering

May 2011

100 pages

ISBN:9781450305761

DOI:10.1145/1984642

Program Chairs:
Marcelo Cataldo
Robert Bosch Corporate Research, USA
,
Cleidson de Souza
IBM Research - Brazil, Brazil
,
Yvonne Dittrich
IT University of Copenhagan, Denmark
,
Rashina Hoda
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
,
Helen Sharp
Open University, UK

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 21 May 2011

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ICSE11

Sponsor:

SIGSOFT

ICSE11: International Conference on Software Engineering

May 21, 2011

HI, Waikiki, Honolulu, USA

Acceptance Rates

CHASE '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 19 of 36 submissions, 53%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 47 of 70 submissions, 67%

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2025 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

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Cited By

Hammoudi MMayr-Dorn CMashkoor AEgyed AHung CHong JBechini ASong E(2021)On the effect of incompleteness to check requirement-to-method tracesProceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3412841.3442021(1465-1474)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3412841.3442021
Hammoudi MMayr-Dorn CMashkoor AEgyed A(2021)TraceRefiner: An Automated Technique for Refining Coarse-Grained Requirement-to-Class Traces2021 28th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC)10.1109/APSEC53868.2021.00009(12-21)Online publication date: Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/APSEC53868.2021.00009
Demi SSanchez‐Gordon MColomo‐Palacios R(2021)What have we learnt from the challenges of (semi‐) automated requirements traceability? A discussion on blockchain applicabilityIET Software10.1049/sfw2.1203515:6(391-411)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2021
https://doi.org/10.1049/sfw2.12035
Berry D(2021)Empirical evaluation of tools for hairy requirements engineering tasksEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-021-09986-026:6Online publication date: 18-Aug-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-021-09986-0
Maro SSundklev EPersson CLiebel GSteghöfer J(2019)Impact of Gamification on Trace Link Vetting: A Controlled ExperimentStructured Object-Oriented Formal Language and Method10.1007/978-3-030-15538-4_6(90-105)Online publication date: 8-Mar-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15538-4_6
Maro SSteghofer JHayes JCleland-Huang JStaron M(2018)Vetting Automatically Generated Trace Links: What Information is Useful to Human Analysts?2018 IEEE 26th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)10.1109/RE.2018.00-52(52-63)Online publication date: Aug-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2018.00-52
Tian QCao QSun Q(2018)Adapting Word Embeddings to Traceability Recovery2018 International Conference on Information Systems and Computer Aided Education (ICISCAE)10.1109/ICISCAE.2018.8666883(255-261)Online publication date: Jul-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICISCAE.2018.8666883
Chitre BHayes JDekhtyar A(2018)Second-Guessing in Tracing Tasks Considered Harmful?Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality10.1007/978-3-319-77243-1_6(92-98)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77243-1_6
Berry D(2017)Evaluation of Tools for Hairy Requirements and Software Engineering Tasks2017 IEEE 25th International Requirements Engineering Conference Workshops (REW)10.1109/REW.2017.25(284-291)Online publication date: Sep-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/REW.2017.25
Zogaan WSharma PMirahkorli MArnaoudova V(2017)Datasets from Fifteen Years of Automated Requirements Traceability Research: Current State, Characteristics, and Quality2017 IEEE 25th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)10.1109/RE.2017.80(110-121)Online publication date: Sep-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2017.80
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