TRACING REQUIREMENTS AS A PROBLEM OF MACHINE LEARNING

Software requirement engineering and evolution essential to software development process, which defines and elaborates what is to be built in a project. Requirements are mostly written in text and will later evolve to fine-grained and actionable artifacts with details about system configurations, technology stacks, etc. Tracing the evolution of requirements enables stakeholders to determine the origin of each requirement and understand how well the software’s design reflects to its requirements. Reckoning requirements traceability is not a trivial task, a machine learning approach is used to classify traceability between various associated requirements. In particular, a 2-learner, ontology-based, pseudo-instances-enhanced approach, where two classifiers are trained to separately exploit two types of features, lexical features and features derived from a hand-built ontology, is investigated for such task. The hand-built ontology is also leveraged to generate pseudo training instances to improve machine learning results. In comparison to a supervised baseline system that uses only lexical features, our approach yields a relative error reduction of 56.0%. Most interestingly, results do not deteriorate when the hand-built ontology is replaced with its automatically constructed counterpart.