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Application of swarm techniques to requirements tracing

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Abstract

We posit that swarm intelligence can be applied to effectively address requirements engineering problems. Specifically, this paper demonstrates the applicability of swarm intelligence to the requirements tracing problem using two techniques: a simple swarm algorithm and a pheromone swarm algorithm. The techniques have been validated using two real-world datasets from two problem domains. The simple swarm technique generated requirements traceability matrices between textual requirements artifacts (high-level requirements traced to low-level requirements, for example). When compared with a baseline information retrieval tracing method, the swarm algorithms showed mixed results. The swarms achieved statistically significantly results on one of the secondary measurements for one dataset compared with the baseline method, lending support for continued investigation into swarms for tracing.

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Notes

  1. Note that F and F2 values reported in this paper differ from the RE 2010 conference paper due to a formula error (\( \beta^{2} \) was not squared in the RE 2010 results but is here).

  2. We used delta ranging from 1 to 5. We present the results for 1, 3, and 5 only. The results corresponding to delta of 2 and 4 followed a linear trend and fit between the selected values.

  3. Note that the RE 2010 paper presented average precision and average recall for the swarm and TF-IDF methods (which was mislabeled as overall precision and recall). The results in this paper use overall precision and recall for all methods.

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Acknowledgments

This work is funded in part by the National Science Foundation under NSF grant CCF-0811140.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Kentucky, 301 Rose Street, Lexington, KY, 40506-0495, USA

    Hakim Sultanov, Jane Huffman Hayes & Wei-Keat Kong

Authors
  1. Hakim Sultanov
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  2. Jane Huffman Hayes
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  3. Wei-Keat Kong
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jane Huffman Hayes.

Appendix: Results for Pine and CM1 datasets

Appendix: Results for Pine and CM1 datasets

This Appendix provides results for the experiments run on the Pine and CM1 datasets. Table 1 lists each Method under each dataset with columns for Threshold, Recall, precision, F, F2, DiffAR, and MAP. Table 2 presents statistical analysis of the secondary measures.

Table 1 Detailed results for the TF-IDF, simple swarm, and pheromone swarm methods on the Pine and CM1 dataset
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Table 2 Statistical analysis for the TF-IDF, simple swarm, and pheromone swarm methods on the Pine and CM1 dataset
Full size table

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Sultanov, H., Hayes, J.H. & Kong, WK. Application of swarm techniques to requirements tracing. Requirements Eng 16, 209–226 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-011-0121-4

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