Automated requirements traceability: The study of human analysts

David Cuddeback, Alex Dekhtyar, Jane Huffman Hayes

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

76 Scopus citations

Abstract

The requirements traceability matrix (RTM) supports many software engineering and software verification and validation (V&V) activities such as change impact analysis, reverse engineering, reuse, and regression testing. The generation of RTMs is tedious and error-prone, though, thus RTMs are often not generated or maintained. Automated techniques have been developed to generate candidate RTMs with some success. When using RTMs to support the V&V of mission- or safety-critical systems, however, a human analyst must vet the candidate RTMs. The focus thus becomes the quality of the final RTM. This paper investigates how human analysts perform when vetting candidate RTMs. Specifically, a study was undertaken at two universities and had 26 participants analyze RTMs of varying accuracy for a Java code formatter program. The study found that humans tend to move their candidate RTM toward the line that represents recall = precision. Participants who examined RTMs with low recall and low precision drastically improved both.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2010 18th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE2010
Pages231-240
Number of pages10
DOIs
StatePublished - 2010
Event2010 18th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE2010 - Sydney, NSW, Australia
Duration: Sep 27 2010Oct 1 2010

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2010 18th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE2010

Conference

Conference2010 18th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE2010
Country/TerritoryAustralia
CitySydney, NSW
Period9/27/1010/1/10

Keywords

  • Decision support
  • Information retrieval
  • Requirements
  • Traceability

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software

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