BEST PAPERS OF RE’10: REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING IN A MULTI-FACETED WORLD Application of swarm techniques to requirements tracing

We posit that swarm intelligence can be applied to effectively address requirements engineering problems. Specifically, this paper demonstrates the applicability of swarm intelligence to the requirements tracing problem using two techniques: a simple swarm algorithm and a pheromone swarm algorithm. The techniques have been validated using two real-world datasets from two problem domains. The simple swarm technique generated requirements traceability matrices between textual requirements artifacts (high-level requirements traced to low-level requirements, for example). When compared with a baseline information retrieval tracing method, the swarm algorithms showed mixed results. The swarms achieved statistically significantly results on one of the secondary measurements for one dataset compared with the baseline method, lending support for continued investigation into swarms for tracing.