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.

History

Received 1 June 2007; revised 3 December 2007; published online 12 June 2008

Reference

Yonggang Zhang, René Witte, Juergen Rilling, and Volker Haarslev. Ontological Approach for the Semantic Recovery of Traceability Links between Software Artifacts. IET Software, Special issue on Language Engineering, Volume 2, Issue 3, June 2008, pp.185–203.

Bibtex entry (also for download):

@article{ZWRH08,
  title = {{Ontological Approach for the Semantic Recovery of 
           Traceability Links between Software Artifacts}},
  author = {Yonggang Zhang and Ren\'{e} Witte and 
            Juergen Rilling and Volker Haarslev},
  journal = {IET Software},
  month = {June},
  note = {Special issue on Language Engineering},
  number = {3},
  pages = {185--203},
  volume = {2},
  year = {2008}
}

Download

Published version: doi 10.1049/iet-sen:20070062
Postprint version: ietsoft2008-traceability.pdf

Copyright © 2008 The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). This paper is a postprint of a paper submitted to and accepted for publication in IET Software and is subject to Institution of Engineering and Technology Copyright. The copy of record is available at the IET Digital Library, doi: 10.1049/iet-sen:20070062.