Abstract

Traceability links provide support for software engineers in understanding relations and dependencies among software artefacts created during the software development process. The authors focus on re-establishing traceability links between existing source code and documentation to support software maintenance. They present a novel approach that addresses this issue by creating formal ontological representations for both documentation and source code artefacts. Their approach recovers traceability links at the semantic level, utilising structural and semantic information found in various software artefacts. These linked ontologies are supported by ontology reasoners to allow the inference of implicit relations among these software artefacts.

CASCON 2007 Workshop Report

IBM Technical Report: TR-74-211

October 25, 2007

Abstract

Many changes have occurred in software engineering research and practice since 1968, when software engineering as a research domain was established. One of these research areas is traceability, a key aspect of any engineering discipline, enables engineers to understand the relations and dependencies among various artifacts in a system.

Abstract

Traceability links provide support for software engineers in understanding the relations and dependencies among software artifacts created during the software development process. In this research, we focus on re-establishing traceability links between existing source code and documentation to support reverse engineering. We present a novel approach that addresses this issue by creating formal ontological representations for both the documentation and source code artifacts.

Abstract

Software maintainers routinely have to deal with a multitude of artifacts, like source code or documents. These artifacts often end up disconnected from each other, due to their different representations and levels of abstractions. One of the main challenges in software maintenance therefore is to recover and maintain the semantic connections among these artifacts. In this research, we present a novel approach that addresses this traceability issue by creating formal ontological representations for both software documentation and source code artifacts. The resulting representations are then aligned to establish traceability links at semantic level. Ontological queries and reasoning can be applied on these representations to infer and establish additional traceability links to support specific maintenance tasks.

Categories and Subject Descriptors: D2.7 [Distribution, Maintenance, and Enhancement]: Documentation, Restructuring, reverse engineering
General Terms: Software, Documentation, Management
Keywords: Ontologies, Traceability, Software Maintenance

Abstract

Documents written in natural languages constitute a major part of the artifacts produced during the software engineering lifecycle. Especially during software maintenance or reverse engineering, semantic information conveyed in these documents can provide important knowledge for the software engineer. In this paper, we present a text mining system capable of populating a software ontology with information detected in documents. A particular novelty is the integration of results from automated source code analysis into an NLP pipeline, allowing to cross-link software artifacts represented in code and natural language on a semantic level.

Abstract

Documents written in natural languages constitute a major part of the software engineering lifecycle artifacts. Especially during software maintenance or reverse engineering, semantic information conveyed in these documents can provide important knowledge for the software engineer. In this paper, we present a text mining system capable of populating a software ontology with information detected in documents.

Together with Juergen Rilling from Concordia University and Philippe Charland from the DRDC Canada I'm organizing a workshop at CASCON 2007: Traceability in Software Engineering—Past, Present and Future. It's on October 25 at the Sheraton Parkway Toronto North Hotel and Convention Centre, Ontario, Canada.