Factors Impacting the Inputs of Traceability Recovery Approaches

In requirement engineering, researchers have proposed various tractability recovery approaches. To the best of our knowledge, all traceability recovery approaches have low precision and recall. Our main claim in this chapter is that there exist factors that impact the traceability approaches’ inputs, in particular source document, target document, and experts’ opinion, that cause low precision and recall. In this chapter, we pursue four objectives: first, to identify and document factors that impact traceability recovery approaches’ inputs; second, to identify metrics/tools to measure/improve the quality of the inputs with respect to the identified factors, third, to provide precautions to control these factors, and, fourth, to empirically prove and quantify the effect of one of these factors—expert’s programming knowledge—on the traceability recovery approaches’ inputs. To achieve the first two objectives, we perform an incremental literature review of traceability recovery approaches and identify and document three key inputs and the seven factors impacting these inputs, out of 12 identified factors. We analyse the reported results in literature for the identified factors to address our third objective. We conduct an empirical study to assess the impact of expert’s programming knowledge, to address our fourth objective. We use the effort, number of correct answers, and time to measure the effect of expert’s programming knowledge on traceability recovery. We conclude that, in the literature, seven factors impacting the inputs of traceability recovery approaches have been identified, documented, and reported along with related metrics/tools and precautions. We suggest that practitioners should be wary of these seven factors and researchers should focus on the five others to improve traceability recovery ap-