Design-code traceability recovery: selecting the basic linkage properties

作     者：Antoniol, G Caprile, B Potrich, A Tonella, P 

作者机构：ITC Irst Ctr Ric Sci & Tecnol I-38050 Trento Italy 

出 版 物：《SCIENCE OF COMPUTER PROGRAMMING》 (计算机程序设计科学)

年 卷 期：2001年第40卷第2-3期

页      面：213-234页

核心收录：

学科分类：08[工学] 0835[工学-软件工程] 0812[工学-计算机科学与技术（可授工学、理学学位）] 

基　　金：This paper compares di3erent traceability recovery methods  anchored on di3erent basic class properties or their combinations. It substantially extends and complements the work described in   which is focused on the traceability procedure itself. The process operates on design artifacts expressed with the object modeling technique (OMT) notation and accepts C++ source code. Both design and code are represented using a custom OO design description language  the abstract object language (AOL). The process recovers an "as-is" design from the code in AOL  compares the recovered design with the actual AOL design  and helps the user to deal with inconsistencies by providing a similarity measure for the matched classes and pointing out the unmatched ones. This activity was partially funded by Sodalia SpA1 under the DEMOS 2 project  aiming at estimating software size and complexity  and improving its quality 

主　　题：traceability object-oriented programming software evolution program understanding software maintenance 

摘      要：Traceability ensures that software artifacts of subsequent phases of the development cycle are consistent. Few works have so far addressed the problem of automatically recovering traceability links between object-oriented (OO) design and code entities. Such a recovery process is required whenever there is no explicit support of traceability from the development process. The recovered information can drive the evolution of the available design so that it corresponds to the code, thus providing a still useful and updated high-level view of the system. Automatic recovery of traceability links can be achieved by determining the similarity of paired elements from design and code. The choice of the properties involved in the similarity computation is crucial for the success of the recovery process. In fact, design and code objects are complex artifacts with several properties attached. The basic anchors of the recovered traceability links should be chosen as those properties (or property combinations) which are expected to be maintained during the transformation of design into code. This may depend on specific practices and/or the development environment, which should therefore be properly accounted for. In this paper different categories of basic properties of design and code entities will be analyzed with respect to the contribution they give to traceability recovery. Several industrial software components will be employed as a benchmark on which the performances of the alternatives are measured. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.