A combination approach for enhancing automated traceability (NIER track)

Tracking a variety of traceability links between artifacts assists software developers in comprehension, efficient development, and effective management of a system. Traceability systems to date based on various Information Retrieval (IR) techniques have been faced with a major open research challenge: how to extract these links with both high precision and high recall. In this paper we describe an experimental approach that combines Regular Expression, Key Phrases, and Clustering with IR techniques to enhance the performance of IR for traceability link recovery between documents and source code. Our preliminary experimental results show that our combination technique improves the performance of IR, increases the precision of retrieved links, and recovers more true links than IR alone.