Software traceability establishes a network of connections between diverse artifacts such as requirements, design, and code. However, given the cost and effort of creating and maintaining trace links manually, researchers have proposed automated approaches using information retrieval techniques. Current approaches focus almost entirely upon generating links between pairs of artifacts and have not leveraged the broader network of interconnected artifacts. In this paper we investigate the use of intermediate artifacts to enhance the accuracy of the generated trace links – focus- ing on paths consisting of source, target, and intermediate artifacts. We propose and evaluate combinations of techniques for computing semantic similarity, scaling scores across multiple paths, and aggregating results from multiple paths. We report results from five projects, including one large industrial project. We find that leverag- ing intermediate artifacts improves the accuracy of end-to-end trace retrieval across all datasets and accuracy metrics. After further analysis, we discover that leveraging intermediate artifacts is only helpful when a project’s artifacts share a common vocabulary, which tends to occur in refinement and decomposition hierarchies of artifacts. Given our hybrid approach that integrates both direct and transitive links, we observed little to no loss of accuracy when intermediate artifacts lacked a shared vocabulary with source or target artifacts.

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Traceability in the software industry is a topic which has been studied for a long time, but there still remain questions to be answered. This thesis looks into the state of software traceability in the software industry is today. It is also a case study in implementing traceability in a model-based testing process at a large automotive company. The thesis finds that while progress has been made in identifying the important aspects of traceability, there does not yet exist a clear consensus on general traceability models which can be used to implement traceability in an arbitrary company or project. Through a case study in implementing traceability in a model-based testing process, the thesis gives one example of how this could potentially be done.

Software development has gotten more complex and certain parts being more and more automated. Continuous integration practices with automated build and testing greatly benefit the development process. Combined with continuous deployment, the software can go directly from commit to deployment within hours or days which means that every commit is a possible deployment. The ability to trace links between artifacts is known as software traceability which has become a necessity and requirement in the industry. Following these traces and the ability to answer questions and base decisions on them is a complex problem. Tools already used in the industry are hard to adapt since every stakeholder requires different needs. Eiffel protocol aims to be as flexible and scalable as possible to fit as many needs as necessary for the stakeholder. This thesis provides an extension to Eiffel-store, an already existing open-source application that can visualize events in the Eiffel protocol that will be extended with functionality so that it can filter events and answer some questions stakeholders might have.

The current migration of companies towards continuous integration and delivery as well all service-oriented business models brings great benefits but also challenges. One challenge that a company striving to establish continuous practices is the need for pipeline traceability, which can bring great enhancements to continuous integration and delivery pipelines as well as offer a competitive edge. This exploratory case study looks at the current and desired states at Axis Communications, a global leader in network video solutions based in Lund, Sweden. It further evaluates the practical and organizational aspects of the adoption of the Eiffel protocol in the company’s pipeline tools through developing a proof-of-concept Eiffel plugin for Artifactory. Based on the discovered technical and organizational needs and obstacles, it draws conclusions and makes recommendations on a possible strategy when introducing Eiffel in a company.

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L'ingénierie des lignes de produits logiciels (Software Product Line Engineering-SPLE en Anglais) est une discipline qui met en œuvre des principes de réutilisation pour le développement efficace de familles de produits. Une famille de produits logiciels est un ensemble de logiciels similaires, ayant des fonctionnalités communes, mais néanmoins différents selon divers aspects; nous parlerons des différentes variantes d'un logiciel. L'utilisation d'une ligne de produit permet de développer les nouveaux produits d'une famille plus vite et d'augmenter la qualité de chacun d'eux. Ces avantages sont liés au fait que les éléments communs aux membres d'une même famille (besoin, architecture, code source, etc.) sont réutilisés et adaptés. Créer de toutes pièces une ligne de produits est une tâche difficile, coûteuse et longue. L'idée sous-jacente à ce travail est qu'une ligne de produits peut être créée par la réingénierie de logiciels similaires (de la même famille) existants, qui ont été préalablement développés de manière ad-hoc. Dans ce contexte, la contribution de cette thèse est triple. La première contribution est la proposition d'une approche pour l'identification des liens de traçabilité entre les caractéristiques (features) d'une application et les parties du code source qui les implémentent, et ce pour toutes les variantes d'une application. Ces liens sont utiles pour générer (dériver) de nouveaux logiciels par la sélection de leurs caractéristiques. L'approche proposée est principalement basée sur l'amélioration de la technique conventionnelle de recherche d'information (Information Retrieval –IR en Anglais) et des approches les plus récentes dans ce domaine. Cette amélioration est liée à deux facteurs. Le premier facteur est l'exploitation des informations liées aux éléments communs ou variables des caractéristiques et du code source des produits logiciels analysés. Le deuxième facteur concerne l'exploitation des similarités et des dépendances entre les éléments du code source. Les résultats que nous avons obtenus par expérimentation confirment l'efficacité de notre approche. Dans la deuxième contribution, nous appliquons nos résultats précédents (contribution no 1) à l'analyse d'impact (Change Impact Analysis –CIA en Anglais). Nous proposons un algorithme permettant à un gestionnaire de ligne de produit ou de produit de détecter quelles les caractéristiques (choix de configuration du logiciel) impactées par une modification du code. Cet algorithme améliore les résultats les plus récents dans ce domaine en permettant de mesurer à quel degré la réalisation d'une caractéristique est impactée par une modification. Dans la troisième contribution nous exploitons à nouveau ces liens de traçabilité (contribution No 1) pour proposer une approche permettant de satisfaire deux objectifs. Le premier concerne l'extraction de l'architecture de la ligne de produits. Nous proposons un ensemble d'algorithmes pour identifier les points de variabilité architecturale à travers l'identification des points de variabilité au niveau des caractéristiques. Le deuxième objectif concerne l'identification des liens de traçabilité entre les caractéristiques et les éléments de l'architecture de la ligne de produits. Les résultats de l'expérimentation montre que l'efficacité de notre approche dépend de l'ensemble des configurations de caractéristiques utilisé (disponibles via les variantes de produits analysés). / Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is a software engineering discipline providing methods to promote systematic software reuse for developing short time-to-market and quality products in a cost-efficient way. SPLE leverages what Software Product Line (SPL) members have in common and manages what varies among them. The idea behind SPLE is to builds core assets consisting of all reusable software artifacts (such as requirements, architecture, components, etc.) that can be leveraged to develop SPL's products in a prescribed way. Creating these core assets is driven by features provided by SPL products.Unfortunately, building SPL core assets from scratch is a costly task and requires a long time which leads to increasing time-to-market and up-front investment. To reduce these costs, existing similar product variants developed by ad-hoc reuse should be re-engineered to build SPLs. In this context, our thesis proposes three contributions. Firstly, we proposed an approach to recover traceability links between features and their implementing source code in a collection of product variants. This helps to understand source code of product variants and facilitate new product derivation from SPL's core assets. The proposed approach is based on Information Retrieval (IR) for recovering such traceability links. In our experimental evaluation, we showed that our approach outperforms the conventional application of IR as well as the most recent and relevant work on the subject. Secondly, we proposed an approach, based on traceability links recovered in the first contribution, to study feature-level Change Impact Analysis (CIA) for changes made to source code of features of product variants. This approach helps to conduct change management from a SPL's manager point of view. This allows him to decide which change strategy should be executed, as there is often more than one change that can solve the same problem. In our experimental evaluation, we proved the effectiveness of our approach in terms of the most used metrics on the subject. Finally, based on traceability recovered in the first contribution, we proposed an approach to contribute for building Software Product Line Architecture (SPLA) and linking its elements with features. Our focus is to identify mandatory components and variation points of components. Therefore, we proposed a set of algorithms to identify this commonality and variability across a given collection of product variants. According to the experimental evaluation, the efficiency of these algorithms mainly depends on the available product configurations.