Maintaining traceability links of software systems is a crucial task for software management and development. Unfortunately, dealing with traceability links are typically taken as afterthought due to time pressure. Some studies attempt to use information retrieval-based methods to automate this task, but they only concentrate on calculating the textual similarity between various software artifacts and do not take into account the properties of such artifacts. In this paper, we propose a novel traceability link recovery approach, which comprehensively measures the similarity between use cases and source code by exploring their particular properties. To this end, we leverage and combine machine learning and logical reasoning techniques. On the one hand, our method extracts features by considering the semantics of the use cases and source code, and uses a classification algorithm to train the classifier. On the other hand, we utilize the relationships between artifacts and define a series of rules to recover traceability links. In particular, we not only leverage source code’s structural information, but also take into account the interrelationships between use cases. We have conducted a series of experiments on multiple datasets to evaluate our approach against existing approaches, the results of which show that our approach is substantially better than other methods.

Continuously maintaining software requirements traceability links is essential for managing and evolving software systems. Due to development pressure, traceability links are usually missing during the early development phase in practice, and thus many information retrieval-based approaches have been proposed to automatically recover the traceability links. However, such approaches typically calculate textual similarities among software artifacts without considering specific features of different software artifacts, leading to less accurate results. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach to recover requirements traceability links, which combines machine learning and logical reasoning to explore features of use cases and code. On one hand, our approach engineers features of use cases and code by taking into account their semantics, based on which a classifier is trained by using supervised learning algorithms. On the other hand, we investigate and leverage the structural information of code to incrementally discover traceability links by defining a list of reasoning rules. We have carried out a series of experiments to compare our approach with state-of-the-art methods, the results of which show that our approach significantly outperforms others.