III: Small: Collaborative Research: Linking Evolving Software Requirements and Acceptance Tests

任何软件开发生命周期的两个不同的里程碑是需求收集和验收测试，其中软件产品是根据其需求进行验证的。然而，这种验证是最困难的任务之一，因为它涉及到在需求的高级描述和源代码中的低级实现之间架起一座抽象的桥梁。确定验收测试如何覆盖不同的需求是非常困难的，因为这意味着跟踪每个验收测试到特定的需求。许多公司和组织没有或者不能投入大量资源来恢复需求、验收测试和其他工件之间的联系。因此，软件开发并没有达到应有的效率，缺乏对整体测试和bug修复工作的控制，并且涉及到核心任务之外的额外工作。最终的结果是这样一种情况：软件测试得有多好，涉众对它有多大的信心都不清楚。我们通过定义和开发一个新的集成模型来解决这个基本问题，该模型使用执行工件、不同的模型和需求来恢复可跟踪性链接。我们开发了自动生成附加测试用例的技术，这些测试用例执行未测试的代码，以恢复附加的可跟踪性链接并验证现有的。为了确保我们的方法是有效的，我们将在真实的工业场景中执行严格的案例研究，以评估模型、技术和方法。因此，软件开发中的实践状态将得到改进，从而在确保软件产品根据其需求进行全面测试方面面临困难。在更广泛的影响中，该项目包括开发教育课程内容，涉及未被充分代表的学生类别，在开源许可下生产软件工具，以及与行业合作转让技术。

Two distinct milestones of any software development lifecycle are requirements gathering and acceptance testing, where a software product is verified against its requirements. Yet this verification is one of the most difficult tasks, since it involves bridging an abstraction gap between high-level descriptions of requirements and their low-level implementations in the source code. Determining how different requirements are covered by acceptance tests is very hard, since it means tracing each acceptance test to specific requirements. Many companies and organizations do not have or cannot invest significant resources into recovering links among requirements, acceptance tests and other artifacts. As a result, software development is not as efficient as it could be, lacking controls to steer the overall testing and bug-fixing effort, and involving extra work peripheral to the core tasks. The end result is a situation in which it is unclear how well software is tested and how much confidence stakeholders can have in it.We are addressing this fundamental problem by defining and developing a new, integrated model for recovering traceability links using execution artifacts, diverse models, and requirements. We develop techniques for automatically generating additional test cases that execute untested code to recover additional traceability links and verify existing ones. To ensure that our approach is effective, we will perform rigorous case studies in real industrial scenarios to evaluate the model, techniques, and methodologies. As a result, the state-of-the-practice in software development will be improved that faces difficulties in ensuing that software products are tested fully with respect to their requirements. Among the broader impacts the project includes developing educational course content, involving underrepresented categories of students, producing software tools under open source licenses, and collaborating with industry to transfer technology.