Software Repositories: A Source for Traceability Links
Huzefa Kagdi, Jonathan I. Maletic · 2007
This paper analyzes six open source projects in order to assess software repositories, such as those managed by Subversion, as a source for uncovering/discovering traceability links between different types of software artifacts. Our finding suggests that software repositories store a variety of artifacts that are central to open source development and use. Furthermore, a heuristic-based approach that uses sequential-pattern mining is presented. This approach analyzes commits in a version history to mine for highly frequent co-occurring changes to different artifacts (e.g., source code and documentation). The hypothesis is if different types of artifacts are committed together frequently then there is a high probability that they have a traceability link between them. Examples of mined traceability links from our preliminary experimentation on mining KDE (K Desktop Environment) repositories are presented.