An Approach for Discovering Traceability Links between Regulatory Documents and Source Code Through User-Interface Labels

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to automatically discover traceability links between regulatory documents and source code by leveraging user-interface labels, which share terminology and contain regulatory information, demonstrated in the green building domain.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel approach that uses UI labels to establish traceability links between regulations and code, reducing manual effort and increasing accuracy.

Findings

Traceability links are accurate in the green building domain.

UI labels effectively reflect regulatory terminology.

Approach simplifies compliance verification.

Abstract

In application domains that are regulated, software vendors must maintain traceability links between the regulatory items and the code base implementing them. In this paper, we present a traceability approach based on the intuition that the regulatory documents and the user-interface of the corresponding software applications are very close. First, they use the same terminology. Second, most important regulatory pieces of information appear in the graphical user-interface because the end-users in those application domains care about the regulation (by construction). We evaluate our approach in the domain of green building. The evaluation involves a domain expert, lead architect of a commercial product within this area. The evaluation shows that the recovered traceability links are accurate.