SHF: Small: RUI: Generating High Quality Trace Links through Intelligent Composition of Tracing Features

软件可跟踪性在确保软件系统正确运行方面起着关键作用。它用于支持各种软件工程活动，如变更管理、合规性验证和安全分析。遗憾的是，当前的实践远远不能提供具有成本效益的可跟踪性，这主要是因为在大型和/或复杂的系统中创建和管理跟踪链接既耗时又费力，而且容易出错。国防部最近委托撰写的一份题为《关键代码：国防软件可制造性》的报告强调了这些问题。该报告强调，研究界需要制定具有成本效益和准确的可追溯性解决方案。虽然最先进的跟踪技术为减少跟踪的成本和工作量提供了巨大的希望，但它们不能满足工业需求，主要是因为生成的链路的质量不精确。这项工作将研究如何集成来自特征建模、产品线开发、人工智能和机器学习的技术，以提供可动态配置的跟踪基础设施。然后，该框架将用于调查和整合一系列新的跟踪技术，预计这些技术将显著提高生成的跟踪链接的质量。该项目的结果将有助于开发软件密集型系统，特别是必须具有可跟踪性的安全关键系统。将通过软件可追溯性英才中心(CoEST.org)和针对工业用户的培训材料，在TraceLab平台上提供解决方案，从而促进技术转让。将为不同的本科生和研究生群体提供正在进行的研究机会，并将编写教学材料并公开提供，供各种关于需求工程、软件工程和软件架构的课程使用。

Software traceability serves a critical role in ensuring that software systems operate correctly. It is used to support a wide variety of software engineering activities such as change management, compliance verification, and safety analysis. Unfortunately current practices fall far short of delivering cost-effective traceability, primarily because creating and managing trace links in large and/or complex systems is time-consuming, arduous, and error-prone. These problems were highlighted in a recent report entitled 'Critical Code: Software Producibility for Defense' commissioned by the Department of Defense. The report stressed the need for the research community to develop cost-effective and accurate traceability solutions. While state of the art tracing techniques offer significant promise for reducing the cost and effort of tracing, they fall short of meeting industrial needs primarily because the quality of the generated links is imprecise. This work will investigate ways to integrate techniques from feature modeling, product line development, artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver a dynamically configurable trace infrastructure. The framework will then be used to investigate and integrate a broad set of novel tracing techniques which are expected to significantly improve the quality of generated trace links.The results of the project will contribute towards the development of software intensive systems, especially safety-critical ones in which traceability is mandatory. Technology transfer will be facilitated by delivering solutions on the TraceLab platform, disseminated via the Center of Excellence for Software Traceability (CoEST.org) and through training materials targeted at industrial users. Ongoing research opportunities will be provided for a diverse group of undergraduate and graduate students, and pedagogical materials will be developed and made publicly available for use in a variety of courses on requirements engineering, software engineering and software architecture.