Improving automated documentation to code traceability by combining retrieval techniques
Open accessAbstract
Documentation written in natural language and source code are two of the major artifacts of a software system. Tracking a variety of traceability links between software documentation and source code assists software developers in comprehension, efficient development, and effective management of a system. Automated traceability systems to date have been faced with a major open research challenge: how to extract these links with both high precision and high recall. In this paper we introduce an approach that combines three supporting techniques, Regular Expression, Key Phrases, and Clustering, with a Vector Space Model (VSM) to improve the performance of automated traceability between documents and source code. This combination approach takes advantage of strengths of the three techniques to ameliorate limitations of VSM. Four case studies have been used to evaluate our combined technique approach. Experimental results indicate that our approach improves the performance of VSM, increases the precision of retrieved links, and recovers more true links than VSM alone.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Whyline does not scale to a program of jEdit's size, approaches like Chen/Grundy's do not support navigations per se, and few of the approaches located handle more than two disjoint topologies.
“However, Whyline does not scale to a program of jEdit's size, approaches like Chen/Grundy's do not support navigations per se, and few of the approaches we have located handle more than two disjoint topologies.”
From Foraging and navigations, fundamentally: developers' predictions of value and cost (2016) · cites this paper as [5]
Mining approaches like Chen and Grundy's are emerging to find relationships among disjoint topologies such as documentation and source code.
“Mining approaches like Chen and Grundy's [5] are also emerging to find relationships among disjoint topologies such as documentation and source code.”
From Foraging and navigations, fundamentally: developers' predictions of value and cost (2016) · cites this paper as [5]
Cites
An analysis of the requirements traceability problem
Gotel, O. C. Z., & Finkelstein, C. W. (2002) · Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering · doi:10.1109/icre.1994.292398 · Cited by 1,246 · see citing works
Recovering traceability links between code and documentation
Antoniol, G., Canfora, G., Casazza, G., Lucia, A. D., & Merlo, E. (2002) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2002.1041053 · Cited by 969 · see citing works
Witten, I. H., Paynter, G. W., Frank, E., Gutwin, C. A., & Nevill-Manning, C. G. (1999) · doi:10.1145/313238.313437 · Cited by 860 · see citing works
Text Mining: Predictive Methods for Analyzing Unstructured Information
Weiss, S. M., Indurkhya, N., Zhang, T., & Damerau, F. J. (2004) · Rare & Special e-Zone (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) · doi:10.1007/978-0-387-34555-0 · Cited by 583 · see citing works
Recovering Documentation-to-Source-Code Traceability Links using Latent Semantic Indexing
Marcus, A., & Maletic, J. I. (2007) · Cited by 546 · see citing works
Advancing candidate link generation for requirements tracing: the study of methods
Hayes, J. H., Dekhtyar, A., & Sundaram, S. K. (2006) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2006.3 · Cited by 482 · see citing works
Recovering documentation-to-source-code traceability links using latent semantic indexing
Marcus, A., & Maletic, J. I. (2003) · Proceedings/Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/icse.2003.1201194 · Cited by 446 · see citing works
Lucia, A. D., Fasano, F., Oliveto, R., & Tortora, G. (2007) · ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology · doi:10.1145/1276933.1276934 · Cited by 356 · see citing works
Improving requirements tracing via information retrieval
Hayes, J. H., Dekhtyar, A., & Osborne, J. (2004) · Journal of Lightwave Technology · doi:10.1109/icre.2003.1232745 · Cited by 289 · see citing works
Standish, T. A. (1984) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.1984.5010272 · Cited by 270 · see citing works
Modernizing Legacy Systems: Software Technologies, Engineering Process and Business Practices
Seacord, R. C., Plakosh, D., & Lewis, G. A. (2003) · Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc. eBooks · Cited by 208 · see citing works
Linking e-mails and source code artifacts
Bacchelli, A., Lanza, M., & Robbes, R. (2010) · doi:10.1145/1806799.1806855 · Cited by 182 · see citing works
Utilizing supporting evidence to improve dynamic requirements traceability
Cleland‐Huang, J., Settimi, R., Duan, C., & Zou, X. (2005) · IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE) · doi:10.1109/re.2005.78 · Cited by 164 · see citing works
Information retrieval models for recovering traceability links between code and documentation
Antoniol, Canfora, G., Casazza, & Lucia, A. D. (2000) · International Conference on Software Maintenance · doi:10.1109/icsm.2000.883003 · Cited by 163 · see citing works
A scenario-driven approach to trace dependency analysis
Egyed, A. F. (2003) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2003.1178051 · Cited by 160 · see citing works
Why and how of requirements tracing
Watkins, R., & Neal, M. (1994) · IEEE Software · doi:10.1109/52.300100 · Cited by 110 · see citing works
Supporting software evolution through dynamically retrieving traces to UML artifacts
Settimi, R., Cleland‐Huang, J., Khadra, O. B., Mody, J., Łukasik, W., & DePalma, C. (2004) · International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution · doi:10.1109/iwpse.2004.1334768 · Cited by 106 · see citing works
Supporting software evolution through dynamically retrieving traces to UML artifacts
Settimi, R., Cleland‐Huang, J., Khadra, O. B., et al. (2004) · International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution · doi:10.1109/iwpse.2004.21 · Cited by 96 · see citing works
XTraQue: traceability for product line systems
Jirapanthong, W., & Zisman, A. (2007) · Software & Systems Modeling · doi:10.1007/s10270-007-0066-8 · Cited by 73 · see citing works
Knowledge Discovery from Legal Databases
Stranieri, A., & Zeleznikow, J. (2005) · Law and philosophy library · doi:10.1007/1-4020-3037-1 · Cited by 69 · see citing works
Lawler, B. A. (2004) · ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes · doi:10.1145/1022494.1022551 · Cited by 44 · see citing works
Traceability recovery by modeling programmer behavior
Antoniol, G., Casazza, C., & Cimitile, A. (2002) · Proceedings - Working Conference on Reverse Engineering · doi:10.1109/wcre.2000.891475 · Cited by 43 · see citing works
Jin, D., & Cordy, J. R. (2005) · Proceedings/Proceedings - Conference on Software Maintenance · doi:10.1109/icsm.2005.68 · Cited by 41 · see citing works
Egyed, A. F., Biffl, S., Heindl, M., & Grünbacher, P. (2005) · International Workshop on Traceability in Emerging Forms of Software Engineering (TEFSE) · doi:10.1145/1107656.1107658 · Cited by 40 · see citing works
Text mining and software engineering: an integrated source code and document analysis approach
Witte, R., Li, Q., Zhang, Y., & Rilling, J. (2008) · IET Software · doi:10.1049/iet-sen:20070110 · Cited by 39 · see citing works
Benchmarking Lightweight Techniques to Link E-Mails and Source Code
Bacchelli, A., D’Ambros, M., Lanza, M., & Robbes, R. (2009) · Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE) · doi:10.1109/wcre.2009.44 · Cited by 39 · see citing works
Wang, X., Lai, G., & Liu, C. (2009) · Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science · doi:10.1016/j.entcs.2009.07.009 · Cited by 33 · see citing works
Supporting product line development through traceability
Jirapanthong, W., & Zisman, A. (2005) · Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC) · doi:10.1109/apsec.2005.101 · Cited by 31 · see citing works
Building Search Applications: Lucene, Lingpipe, and Gate
Konchady, M. (2008) · Cited by 27 · see citing works
Visualizing traceability links between source code and documentation
Chen, X., Hosking, J., & Grundy, J. (2012) · IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) · doi:10.1109/vlhcc.2012.6344496 · Cited by 27 · see citing works
Self-citationTraceability in Software Engineering – Past, Present and Future
Rilling, J., Charland, P., & Witte, R. (2007) · Cited by 5 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Information Retrieval Based Nearest Neighbor Classification for Fine-Grained Bug Severity Prediction
Tian, Y., Lo, D., & Sun, C. P. (2012) · Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE) · doi:10.1109/wcre.2012.31 · Cited by 185 · see citing works
Borg, M., Runeson, P., & Ardö, A. (2013) · Empirical Software Engineering · doi:10.1007/s10664-013-9255-y · Cited by 166 · see citing works
Automatic Defect Categorization
Thung, F., Lo, D., & Jiang, L. (2012) · Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE) · doi:10.1109/wcre.2012.30 · Cited by 125 · see citing works
Improving API Caveats Accessibility by Mining API Caveats Knowledge Graph
Li, H., Li, S., Sun, J., Xing, Z., Peng, X., Liu, M., & Zhao, X. (2018) · IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM) · doi:10.1109/icsme.2018.00028 · Cited by 103 · see citing works
Improving trace accuracy through data-driven configuration and composition of tracing features
Lohar, S., Amornborvornwong, S., Zisman, A., & Cleland‐Huang, J. (2013) · ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE) · doi:10.1145/2491411.2491432 · Cited by 79 · see citing works
Parizi, R. M., Lee, S. P., & Dabbagh, M. (2014) · IEEE Transactions on Reliability · doi:10.1109/tr.2014.2338254 · Cited by 57 · see citing works
Enhancing candidate link generation for requirements tracing: The cluster hypothesis revisited
Niu, N., & Mahmoud, A. (2012) · IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE) · doi:10.1109/re.2012.6345842 · Cited by 55 · see citing works
Active Semi-supervised Defect Categorization
Thung, F., Le, X.-B. D., & Lo, D. (2015) · IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC) · doi:10.1109/icpc.2015.15 · Cited by 55 · see citing works
A semantic relatedness approach for traceability link recovery
Mahmoud, A., Niu, N., & Xu, S. (2012) · IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC) · doi:10.1109/icpc.2012.6240487 · Cited by 51 · see citing works
Foraging and navigations, fundamentally: developers' predictions of value and cost
Piorkowski, D., Henley, A. Z., Nabi, T., Fleming, S. D., Scaffidi, C., & Burnett, M. (2016) · Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering · doi:10.1145/2950290.2950302 · Cited by 38 · see citing works
RepoLike: amulti-feature-based personalized recommendation approach for open-source repositories
Yang, C., Fan, Q., Wang, T., Yin, G., Zhang, X., Yu, Y., & Wang, H. (2019) · Frontiers of Information Technology & Electronic Engineering · doi:10.1631/fitee.1700196 · Cited by 34 · see citing works
On the gamification of human-centric traceability tasks in software testing and coding
Parizi, R. M. (2016) · IEEE/ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering Research, Management and Applications (SERA) · doi:10.1109/sera.2016.7516146 · Cited by 34 · see citing works
Niu, N., Mahmoud, A., Chen, Z., & Bradshaw, G. L. (2013) · doi:10.5555/2486788.2486864 · Cited by 30 · see citing works
Visualizing traceability links between source code and documentation
Chen, X., Hosking, J., & Grundy, J. (2012) · IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) · doi:10.1109/vlhcc.2012.6344496 · Cited by 27 · see citing works
Self-citationActive semi-supervised defect categorization
Thung, F., Le, X.-B. D., & Lo, D. (2015) · doi:10.5555/2820282.2820292 · Cited by 26 · see citing works
Zogaan, W. A., Sharma, P., Mirahkorli, M., & Arnaoudova, V. (2017) · IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE) · doi:10.1109/re.2017.80 · Cited by 26 · see citing works
FunkR-pDAE: Personalized Project Recommendation Using Deep Learning
Zhang, P., Xiong, F., LEUNG, H. K. N., & Song, W. (2018) · IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing · doi:10.1109/tetc.2018.2870734 · Cited by 25 · see citing works
Niu, N., Mahmoud, A., Chen, Z., & Bradshaw, G. L. (2013) · ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion) · doi:10.1109/icse.2013.6606603 · Cited by 22 · see citing works
Know-How in Programming Tasks: From Textual Tutorials to Task-Oriented Knowledge Graph
Sun, J., Xing, Z., Chu, R., Bai, H., Wang, J., & Peng, X. (2019) · IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM) · doi:10.1109/icsme.2019.00039 · Cited by 20 · see citing works
Enhancing Traceability Link Recovery with Unlabeled Data
Zhu, J., Xiao, G., Zheng, Z., & Sui, Y. (2022) · Proceedings/Proceedings - International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering · doi:10.1109/issre55969.2022.00050 · Cited by 18 · see citing works
Search-based requirements traceability recovery: A multi-objective approach
Ghannem, A., Hamdi, M. S., Kessentini, M., & Ammar, H. H. (2017) · IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) · doi:10.1109/cec.2017.7969440 · Cited by 16 · see citing works
Wang, H., Shen, G., Huang, Z., Yu, Y., & Chen, K. (2021) · Frontiers of Information Technology & Electronic Engineering · doi:10.1631/fitee.2000126 · Cited by 15 · see citing works
Tsuchiya, R., Washizaki, H., Fukazawa, Y., Oshima, K., & Mibe, R. (2015) · Lecture notes in computer science · doi:10.1007/978-3-319-19069-3_16 · Cited by 15 · see citing works
Stakeholders' Information Needs for Artifacts and Their Dependencies in a Real World Context
Muller, S. C., & Fritz, T. (2013) · IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM) · doi:10.1109/icsm.2013.40 · Cited by 14 · see citing works
INCREMENT: A Mixed MDE-IR Approach for Regulatory Requirements Modeling and Analysis
Sannier, N., & Baudry, B. (2014) · Lecture notes in computer science · doi:10.1007/978-3-319-05843-6_11 · Cited by 14 · see citing works
Dai, P., Li, Y., Wang, Y., Jin, D., & Gong, Y. (2023) · Mathematics · doi:10.3390/math11020315 · Cited by 13 · see citing works
Yang, C., Fan, Q., Wang, T., Yin, G., & Wang, H. (2016) · Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware · doi:10.1145/2993717.2993725 · Cited by 12 · see citing works
Sannier, N., & Baudry, B. (2012) · doi:10.1109/modre.2012.6360072 · Cited by 12 · see citing works
Towards Gamification in Software Traceability: Between Test and Code Artifacts
Parizi, R. M., Kasem, A., & Abdullah, A. B. (2015) · International Conference on Software Engineering and Applications (ICSOFT-EA) · doi:10.5220/0005555503930400 · Cited by 12 · see citing works
Bella, E. E., Creff, S., Gervais, M., & Bendraou, R. (2019) · IEEE International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference (EDOC) · doi:10.1109/edoc.2019.00028 · Cited by 11 · see citing works
Preliminary Systematic Literature Review of Software and Systems Traceability
Kaiya, H., Sato, R., Hazeyama, A., Ogata, S., Okubo, T., Tanaka, T., Yoshioka, N., & Washizaki, H. (2017) · Procedia Computer Science · doi:10.1016/j.procs.2017.08.152 · Cited by 9 · see citing works
Demi, S., Sánchez‐Gordón, M., & Colomo‐Palacios, R. (2021) · IET Software · doi:10.1049/sfw2.12035 · Cited by 9 · see citing works
Establishing and Navigating Trace Links between Elements of Informal Diagram Sketches
Kleffmann, M., Rohl, S., Gruhn, V., & Book, M. (2015) · IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Software and Systems Traceability (SST) · doi:10.1109/sst.2015.8 · Cited by 9 · see citing works
Supporting collaboration of heterogeneous teams in an augmented team room
Kleffmann, M., Book, M., & Gruhn, V. (2014) · International Workshop on Social Software Engineering (SSE) · doi:10.1145/2661685.2661688 · Cited by 8 · see citing works
Towards recovering and maintaining trace links for model sketches across interactive displays
Kleffmann, M., Book, M., & Gruhn, V. (2013) · International Workshop on Traceability in Emerging Forms of Software Engineering (TEFSE) · doi:10.1109/tefse.2013.6620150 · Cited by 7 · see citing works
Chen, X., Hosking, J., Grundy, J., & Amor, R. (2018) · Automated Software Engineering · doi:10.1007/s10515-018-0243-8 · Cited by 7 · see citing works
Self-citationJaved, M. A., Stevanetic, S., & Zdun, U. (2016) · European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs · doi:10.1145/3011784.3011810 · Cited by 6 · see citing works
Search-Based Requirements Traceability Recovery
Ghannem, A., Hamdi, M. S., Kessentini, M., & Ammar, H. H. (2017) · Lecture notes in networks and systems · doi:10.1007/978-3-319-56994-9_11 · Cited by 6 · see citing works
Supporting Requirements to Code Traceability Creation by Code Comments
Shen, G., Wang, H., Huang, Z., Yu, Y., & Chen, K. (2021) · International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering · doi:10.1142/s0218194021500340 · Cited by 6 · see citing works
Navigation among Model Sketches on Large Interactive Displays
Kleffmann, M., Book, M., & Gruhn, V. (2014) · IEEE International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference Workshops (EDOCW) · doi:10.1109/edocw.2014.37 · Cited by 4 · see citing works
API Topics Issues in Stack Overflow Q&As Posts: An Empirical Study
Ajam, G., Rodríguez, C., & Benatallah, B. (2020) · Latin American Computer Conference (CLEI) · doi:10.1109/clei52000.2020.00024 · Cited by 4 · see citing works
Development of Robust Traceability Benchmarks
Chen, X., Hosking, J., Grundy, J., & Amor, R. (2013) · Australasian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC) · doi:10.1109/aswec.2013.26 · Cited by 4 · see citing works
Self-citationTraceability Link Mining — Focusing on Usability
Yazawa, Y., Ogata, S., Okano, K., Kaiya, H., & Washizaki, H. (2017) · IEEE Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC) · doi:10.1109/compsac.2017.254 · Cited by 3 · see citing works
Towards A Knowledge Base for Software Developers to Choose Suitable Traceability Techniques
Kaiya, H., Hazeyama, A., Ogata, S., Okubo, T., Yoshioka, N., & Washizaki, H. (2019) · Procedia Computer Science · doi:10.1016/j.procs.2019.09.276 · Cited by 2 · see citing works
Knowledge Incorporation in Requirements Traceability Recovery
Ghannem, A., Hamdi, M. S., Kessentini, M., & Ammar, H. H. (2021) · Lecture notes in electrical engineering · doi:10.1007/978-981-33-6385-4_24 · Cited by 2 · see citing works
Datasets Used in Fifteen Years of Automated Requirements Traceability Research
Sharma, P. (2017) · RIT Scholar Works (Rochester Institute of Technology) · Cited by 2 · see citing works
Connecting Source Code Changes with Reasons
Dave, N., da Silva, R. P., Drobesh, D., Upreti, P., Erdly, W. W., & Asuncion, H. U. (2018)
Integrated Traceability Approach for an Effective Impact Analysis
Gul, L., Imtiaz, S., Munir, S., Munir, M., & Khan, M. A. (2021) · Mehran University Research Journal of Engineering and Technology · doi:10.22581/muet1982.2102.09
Towards Visualization of Unit Test and Source Code Relations
Aljawabrah, N. (2021) · doi:10.14232/phd.10723
Nath, S. S., Roy, B., & Jahan, M. (2025) · IEEE International Conference on Collaborative Advances in Software and Computing (CASCON) · doi:10.1109/cascon66301.2025.00067
- Authors
- Chen, X., & Grundy, J.
- Affiliations
- University of Auckland (NZ)
- Swinburne University of Technology (AU)
- Venue
- 2011 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2011)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2011-11
- Pages
- 223-232
- OpenAlex
- W2022801033
- Cited by
- 50
- References
- 30
- Citations by year
- 2025: 1 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 1 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 4 · 2017: 6 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 5 · 2014: 4 · 2013: 7 · 2012: 6
- FWCI
- 4.08
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- figshare.com
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) (publishedVersion)
- Swinburne figshare (Swinburne University of Technology) (acceptedVersion)
- Figshare (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Swinburne figshare (Swinburne University of Technology)
- Funders
- University of Auckland
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Software › Model-Driven Software Engineering Techniques
- Keywords
- software traceability, source code, regular expressions, keyword extraction, clustering, vector space model, information retrieval, precision and recall
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
