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Trace Link Recovery for Software Architecture Documentation

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Software Architecture (ECSA 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 12857))

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Abstract

Software Architecture Documentation often consists of different artifacts. On the one hand, there is informal textual documentation. On the other hand, there are formal models of the system. Finding related information in multiple artifacts with different level of formality is often not easy. Therefore, trace links between these can help to understand the system. In this paper, we propose an extendable, agent-based framework for creating trace links between textual software architecture documentation and models. Our framework SWATTR offers different pipeline stages to extract text and model information, identify elements in text, and connect these elements to model elements. In each stage, multiple agents can be used to capture necessary information to automatically create trace links. We evaluate the performance of our approach with three case studies and compare our results to baseline approaches. The results for our approach are good to excellent with a weighted average \(F_1\)-Score of 0.72 over all case studies. Moreover, our approach outperforms the baseline approaches on non-weighted average by at least 0.24 (weighted 0.31).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/kit-sdq/Ecore2OWL.

  2. 2.

    See https://sdqweb.ipd.kit.edu/wiki/Media_Store and https://github.com/ArDoCo/CaseStudies/tree/master/TeaStore.

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Acknowledgment

This work was supported by the Competence Center for Applied Security Technology (KASTEL Project 46.23.01).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany

    Jan Keim, Sophie Schulz, Dominik Fuchß, Claudius Kocher, Janek Speit & Anne Koziolek

  2. Competence Center for Applied Security Technology (KASTEL), Karlsruhe, Germany

    Sophie Schulz

Authors
  1. Jan Keim
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  2. Sophie Schulz
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  3. Dominik Fuchß
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  4. Claudius Kocher
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  5. Janek Speit
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  6. Anne Koziolek
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jan Keim .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Information Systems Engineering, Technische Universität Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Stefan Biffl

  2. University of Castilla-La Mancha, Albacete, Spain

    Elena Navarro

  3. Department of Computer Science, Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden

    Welf Löwe

  4. Design and Engineering, Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden

    Marjan Sirjani

  5. Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy

    Raffaela Mirandola

  6. KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Danny Weyns

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Keim, J., Schulz, S., Fuchß, D., Kocher, C., Speit, J., Koziolek, A. (2021). Trace Link Recovery for Software Architecture Documentation. In: Biffl, S., Navarro, E., Löwe, W., Sirjani, M., Mirandola, R., Weyns, D. (eds) Software Architecture. ECSA 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12857. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86044-8_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86044-8_7

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-86043-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-86044-8

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