Design-code traceability recovery: selecting the basic linkage properties

Traceability ensures that software artifacts of subsequent phases of the de velopment cycle are consistent. Few works have so far addressed the problem of automatically recovering traceability links between object-oriented (OO ) design and code entities. Such a recovery process is required whenever th ere is no explicit support of traceability from the development process. Th e recovered information can drive the evolution of the available design so that it corresponds to the code, thus providing a still useful and updated high-level view of the system. Automatic recovery of traceability links can be achieved by determining the similarity of paired elements from design and code. The choice of the prop erties involved in the similarity computation is crucial for the success of the recovery process. In fact, design and code objects are complex artifac ts with several properties attached. The basic anchors of the recovered tra ceability links should be chosen as those properties (or property combinati ons) which are expected to be maintained during the transformation of desig n into code. This may depend on specific practices and/or the development e nvironment, which should therefore be properly accounted for. In this paper different categories of basic properties of design and code e ntities will be analyzed with respect to the contribution they give to trac eability recovery. Several industrial software components will be employed as a benchmark on which the performances of the alternatives are measured. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.