Recovering Transitive Traceability Links among Various Software Artifacts for Developers

Traceability links between software artifacts can assist in several software development tasks. There are some automatic traceability recovery methods that help with managing the massive number of software artifacts and their relationships, but they do not work well for software artifacts whose descriptions are different in terms of language or abstraction level. To overcome these weakness, we propose the Connecting Links Method (CLM), which recovers transitive traceability links between two artifacts by intermediating a third artifact. In order to apply CLM for general use without limitation in terms of software artifact type, we have designed a standardized method to calculate the relation score of transitive traceability links using the scores of direct traceability links between three artifacts. Furthermore, we propose an improvement of CLM by considering software version. We evaluated CLM by applying it to three software products and found that it is more effective for software artifacts whose language type or vocabulary are different compared to previous methods using textual similarity.