Kazuki Nishikawa, Hironori Washizaki, Yoshiaki Fukazawa, Keishi Ohshima, Ryota Mibe, “Recovering Transitive Traceability Links among Software Artifacts,” Proceedings of the 31st IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2015), ERA Track, Sep 29 – Oct 1, 2015, Bremen, Germany. (to appear) (CORE Rank A, ERA Track: 17/48=35%)

Although many methods have been suggested to automatically recover traceability links in software development, they do not cover all link combinations (e.g., links between the source code and test cases) because specific documents or artifact features (e.g., log documents and structures of source code) are used. In this paper, we propose a method called the Connecting Links Method (CLM) to recover transitive traceability links between two artifacts using a third artifact. Because CLM uses a different artifact as a document, it can be applied to kinds of various data. Basically, CLM recovers traceability links using the Vector Space Model (VSM) in Information Retrieval (IR) methods. For example, by connecting links between A and B and between B and C, CLM retrieves the link between A and C transitively. In this way, CLM can recover transitive traceability links when a suggested method cannot. Here we demonstrate that CLM can effectively recover links that VSM cannot using Open Source Software.