| Title | Improving the Effectiveness of Traceability Link Recovery using Hierarchical Bayesian Networks |
| Publication Type | Conference Paper |
| Year of Publication | 2020 |
| Authors | Moran, Kevin, Palacio, David N., Bernal-Cárdenas, Carlos, McCrystal, Daniel, Poshyvanyk, Denys, Shenefiel, Chris, Johnson, Jeff |
| Conference Name | 2020 IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) |
| Date Published | Oct. 2020 |
| Publisher | IEEE |
| ISBN Number | 978-1-4503-7121-6 |
| Keywords | Automated Secure Software Engineering, Bayes methods, composability, information retrieval, Probabilistic logic, probabilistic modeling, Prototypes, pubcrawl, resilience, Resiliency, Software, software engineering, Software measurement, Software Traceability |
| 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 ≈14% in the best case and ≈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 Comet's potential for practical applicability in a survey with developers from Cisco Systems who used a prototype Comet Jenkins plugin. |
| URL | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9284034 |
| Citation Key | moran_improving_2020 |
Improving the Effectiveness of Traceability Link Recovery using Hierarchical Bayesian Networks