State of the Art of Traceability in Open-Source Projects

Abstract

Software and systems traceability is widely accepted as an essential element for supporting many software development tasks. Todays version control systems provide inbuilt features that allow developers to tag each commit with one or more issue IDs, thereby providing the building blocks from which project-wide traceability can be established between feature requests, bug fixes, commits, source code, and tests. We analyzed seven large open source projects to investigate to what extent developers explicitly established traces between issues and commits. Therefore, we categorized resolved issues and commits and studied the traces between the resulting artifact clusters. Among other metrics, our research shows, that 70% of all resolved issues are linked to commits. However, in the opposite direction, only 48% of the commits are linked to issues. Thus, open-source developers actively establish traceability. Nevertheless, automated traceability techniques might increase the amount of interlinking.