Challenges in Using Interaction Data for Trace Link Creation

Abstract

For direct usage of trace links during a development project the precision of information retrieval (IR) based trace link creation is not sufficient [1]. Too many false links generated by IR hinder developers to directly use the resulting links and require further assessment by an expert. Thus, we develop an interaction based trace link creation approach (IL) aiming to create trace links with perfect precision. In IL we utilize the interactions of developers recorded in the IDE while working on a requirement. We already performed an evaluation of our IL approach with open source data [2]. For that we could show that IL creates trace links with perfect precision and has a better recall than IR. However, in a follow up evaluation in which we applied our approach in a student project it turned out that the precision of created trace links was not perfect. Now we are investigating the reasons for this not perfect precision, in particular we try to find techniques to detect wrong links. In this short paper we motivate and introduce our IL approach, compare the two different projects in which we applied IL, discuss reasons why links created by IL can be wrong and outline the challenges how to countervail the creation of wrong links.