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

软件可追溯性在确保软件系统正确运行方面起着关键作用。它用于支持各种各样的软件工程活动，例如变更管理、遵从性验证和安全分析。不幸的是，当前的实践远远不能提供具有成本效益的可追溯性，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是耗时、费力且容易出错的。这些问题在最近由国防部委托的题为“关键代码：国防软件可生产性”的报告中得到了强调。该报告强调，研究界需要开发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，但它们无法满足工业需求，主要是因为生成的链接的质量不精确。这项工作将研究如何整合特征建模、产品线开发、人工智能和机器学习等技术，以提供动态可配置的跟踪基础设施。然后，该框架将用于调查和集成一套广泛的新型跟踪技术，这些技术有望显著提高生成的跟踪链接的质量。该项目的结果将有助于软件密集型系统的开发，特别是可追溯性是强制性的安全关键系统。通过TraceLab平台提供解决方案，通过软件可追溯性卓越中心（CoEST.org）和针对工业用户的培训材料进行传播，将促进技术转让。正在进行的研究机会将提供给不同群体的本科生和研究生，教学材料将被开发并公开提供，用于各种需求工程、软件工程和软件架构课程。

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.