Ryosuke Tsuchiya, Kazuki Nishikawa, Hironori Washizaki, Yoshiaki Fukazawa, Yuya Shinohara, Keishi Oshima, Ryota Mibe, “Recovering Transitive Traceability Links among Various Software Artifacts for Developers,” IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems, pp. 1-10, 2019 (SCIE, Scopus indexed)(to appear)

Traceability links between software artifacts can assist in several software development tasks. There are some automatic traceability recovery methods to ease managing the massive number of software artifacts and their relationships. However, they cannot work well for software artifacts whose description are different in terms of language or abstract level. To cover weakness of them, herein we propose Connecting Links Method (CLM), which recovers transitive traceability links between two artifacts by intermediating the third artifact. In order to apply CLM for general use without limitation of software artifact types, we have designed the standardized method to calculate relation score of transitive traceability links using the scores of direct traceability links between three artifacts. Furthermore, we propose improvement of CLM by considering software version. Then, we have evaluated CLM by applying it to three software products. As a result, we have confirmed that CLM has the potential to be more applicable for software artifacts whose language type or vocabulary are different than previous methods using textual similarity.