Robust Requirements Tracing via Internet Search Technology: Improving an IV and V Technique
There are three major objectives to this phase of the work. (1) Improvement of Information Retrieval (IR) methods for Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) requirements tracing. Information Retrieval methods are typically developed for very large (order of millions - tens of millions and more documents) document collections and therefore, most successfully used methods somewhat sacrifice precision and recall in order to achieve efficiency. At the same time typical IR systems treat all user queries as independent of each other and assume that relevance of documents to queries is subjective for each user. The IV&V requirements tracing problem has a much smaller data set to operate on, even for large software development projects; the set of queries is predetermined by the high-level specification document and individual requirements considered as query input to IR methods are not necessarily independent from each other. Namely, knowledge about the links for one requirement may be helpful in determining the links of another requirement. Finally, while the final decision on the exact form of the traceability matrix still belongs to the IV&V analyst, his/her decisions are much less arbitrary than those of an Internet search engine user. All this suggests that the information available to us in the framework of the IV&V tracing problem can be successfully leveraged to enhance standard IR techniques, which in turn would lead to increased recall and precision. We developed several new methods during Phase II; (2) IV&V requirements tracing IR toolkit. Based on the methods developed in Phase I and their improvements developed in Phase II, we built a toolkit of IR methods for IV&V requirements tracing. The toolkit has been integrated, at the data level, with SAIC's SuperTracePlus (STP) tool; (3) Toolkit testing. We tested the methods included in the IV&V requirements tracing IR toolkit on a number of projects.