Improving the Effectiveness of Traceability Link Recovery using Hierarchical Bayesian Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces Comet, a hierarchical Bayesian model that improves software traceability link recovery by integrating multiple similarity measures and diverse information sources, achieving higher accuracy.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel probabilistic model, Comet, that enhances traceability link recovery by modeling relationships across artifacts using multiple similarity measures and incorporating diverse data sources.

Findings

Comet outperforms baseline methods with up to 14% improvement in precision.

The model effectively combines multiple similarity measures and contextual information.

Empirical evaluation shows consistent accuracy gains across different datasets.

Abstract

Traceability is a fundamental component of the modern software development process that helps to ensure properly functioning, secure programs. Due to the high cost of manually establishing trace links, researchers have developed automated approaches that draw relationships between pairs of textual software artifacts using similarity measures. However, the effectiveness of such techniques are often limited as they only utilize a single measure of artifact similarity and cannot simultaneously model (implicit and explicit) relationships across groups of diverse development artifacts. In this paper, we illustrate how these limitations can be overcome through the use of a tailored probabilistic model. To this end, we design and implement a HierarchiCal PrObabilistic Model for SoftwarE Traceability (Comet) that is able to infer candidate trace links. Comet is capable of modeling relationships between artifacts by combining the complementary observational prowess of multiple measures of textual similarity. Additionally, our model can holistically incorporate information from a diverse set of sources, including developer feedback and transitive (often implicit) relationships among groups of software artifacts, to improve inference accuracy. We conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation of Comet that illustrates an improvement over a set of optimally configured baselines of $\approx$14% in the best case and $\approx$5% across all subjects in terms of average precision. The comparative effectiveness of Comet in practice, where optimal configuration is typically not possible, is likely to be higher. Finally, we illustrate Comets potential for practical applicability in a survey with developers from Cisco Systems who used a prototype Comet Jenkins plugin.