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Effective use of analysts’ effort in automated tracing

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Abstract

Because of the large amount of effort it takes to manually trace requirements, automated traceability methods for mapping textual software engineering artifacts to each other and generating candidate links have received increased attention over the past 15 years. Automatically generated links, however, are viewed as candidates until human analysts confirm/reject them for the final requirements traceability matrix. Studies have shown that analysts are a fallible, but necessary, participant in the tracing process. There are two key measures guiding analyst work on the evaluation of candidate links: accuracy of analyst decision and efficiency of their work. Intuitively, it is expected that the more effort the analyst spends on candidate link validation, the more accurate the final traceability matrix is likely to be, although the exact nature of this relationship may be difficult to gauge outright. To assist analysts in making the best use of their time when reviewing candidate links, prior work simulated four possible behaviors and showed that more structured approaches save the analysts’ time/effort required to achieve certain levels of accuracy. However, these behavioral simulations are complex to run and their results difficult to interpret and use in practice. In this paper, we present a mathematical model for evaluating analyst effort during requirements tracing tasks. We apply this model to a simulation study of 12 candidate link validation approaches. The simulation study is conducted on a number of different datasets. In each study, we assume perfect analyst behavior (i.e., analyst always being correct when making a determination about a link). Under this assumption, we evaluate the estimated effort for the analyst and plot it against the accuracy of the recovered traceability matrix. The effort estimation model is guided by a parameter specifying the relationship between the time it takes an analyst to evaluate a presented link and the time it takes an analyst to discover a link not presented to her. We construct a series of effort estimations based on different values of the model parameter. We found that the analysts’ approach to candidate link validation—essentially the order in which the analyst examines presented candidate links—does impact the effort. We also found that the lowest ratio of the cost of finding a correct link from scratch over the cost of recognizing a correct link yields the lowest effort for all datasets, but that the lowest effort does not always yield the highest quality matrix. We finally observed that effort varies by dataset. We conclude that the link evaluation approach we call “Top 1 Not Yet Examined Feedback Pruning” was the overall winner in terms of effort and highest quality and, thus, should be followed by human analysts if possible.

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Notes

  1. Making the best use of analysts’ effort is difficult, which is the reason why “Cost-Effective” was named as the #2 Grand Challenge [4] facing requirement practitioners and researchers. The challenge reads “2. Cost-Effective—The return from using traceability is adequate in relation to the outlay of establishing it.”

  2. An automated method returns a link if it evaluates the similarity of the high-level and low-level elements forming the link above a certain, pre-defined in the method threshold value.

  3. These parameters were labeled α, β, and γ in prior work [5]. We rename them for this paper to avoid confusion with the Rochio feedback parameters.

  4. Note that “requirements tracing” is often the moniker even when requirements are not being traced.

  5. It should be noted that many of the 48 scenarios resulted in ties for minimum effort value; thus, there were far less than 48 scenarios that were “in the running” for best and worst.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Matt Smith and Chelsea Hayes for their work on the spreadsheets and charts and tables in this paper. This work was partially sponsored by NASA under Grant NNX06AD02G. This work was funded in part by the National Science Foundation under NSF Grant CCF 0811140 and by a Lockheed Martin grant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, College of Engineering, University of Kentucky (UK), Lexington, KY, 40506-0495, USA

    Jane Huffman Hayes & Jody Larsen

  2. Department of Computer Science, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, CA, USA

    Alex Dekhtyar

  3. Department of Software and Computer Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc

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  1. Jane Huffman Hayes
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Correspondence to Jane Huffman Hayes.

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Hayes, J.H., Dekhtyar, A., Larsen, J. et al. Effective use of analysts’ effort in automated tracing. Requirements Eng 23, 119–143 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-016-0260-8

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