Rongqi Pan

Feifei Niu, Rongqi Pan, Lionel C. Briand et al.

In automotive software development, as well as other domains, traceability between stakeholder requirements and system requirements is crucial to ensure consistency, correctness, and regulatory compliance. However, erroneous or missing traceability relationships often arise due to improper propagation of requirement changes or human errors in requirement mapping, leading to inconsistencies and increased maintenance costs. Existing approaches do not address traceability between stakeholder and system requirements, and are not validated on industrial data, where the links between requirements are established manually by engineers. Additionally, automotive requirements often exhibit variations in the way they are expressed, posing challenges for training-based approaches. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) provide new opportunities to address these challenges. In this paper, we introduce TVR, a requirement Traceability Validation and Recovery approach primarily targeting automotive systems, leveraging LLMs enhanced with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). TVR is designed to validate existing traceability links and recover missing ones with high accuracy. The experimental results highlight the practical effectiveness of TVR in industrial settings, offering a promising solution for improving requirements traceability in complex automotive systems.

Rongqi Pan, Mahboubeh Dadkhah, Jean Baptiste Minani et al.

Technical documents contain rich domain knowledge for automating downstream tasks such as system testing. While this paper focuses on Ethernet switch configuration manuals (ESCMs), we propose a general framework that can be adapted to different industrial contexts. ESCMs provide valuable domain knowledge for Ethernet switch testing, but their semi-structured format, implicit step attributes, and complex section dependencies make them difficult to directly leverage for test automation. To address this, we generate knowledge graphs (KGs) that capture configuration knowledge from ESCM in a structured form. We propose a multi-agent LLM-based framework that extracts, evaluates, and improves KGs from ESCMs using a fine-grained KG schema and an iterative Extract-Evaluate-Improve (EEI) loop. Our evaluation on 50 real-world ESCMs shows that our framework achieves high extraction correctness using the original prompts, with average correctness scores ranging from 0.97 to 0.99 across three extraction tasks. For challenging ESCMs, the EEI loop further improves correctness through manual-specific prompt refinement. Moreover, the LLM judgments and human evaluations show substantial agreement, with Cohen's kappa of at least 0.72 across all extraction tasks. Finally, feedback from industry testers indicates that the generated KGs can support the generation of useful and correct test case specifications (TCSs) for downstream testing.

Rongqi Pan, Mojtaba Bagherzadeh, Taher A. Ghaleb et al.

Regression testing is an essential activity to assure that software code changes do not adversely affect existing functionalities. With the wide adoption of Continuous Integration (CI) in software projects, which increases the frequency of running software builds, running all tests can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. To alleviate that problem, Test case Selection and Prioritization (TSP) techniques have been proposed to improve regression testing by selecting and prioritizing test cases in order to provide early feedback to developers. In recent years, researchers have relied on Machine Learning (ML) techniques to achieve effective TSP (ML-based TSP). Such techniques help combine information about test cases, from partial and imperfect sources, into accurate prediction models. This work conducts a systematic literature review focused on ML-based TSP techniques, aiming to perform an in-depth analysis of the state of the art, thus gaining insights regarding future avenues of research. To that end, we analyze 29 primary studies published from 2006 to 2020, which have been identified through a systematic and documented process. This paper addresses five research questions addressing variations in ML-based TSP techniques and feature sets for training and testing ML models, alternative metrics used for evaluating the techniques, the performance of techniques, and the reproducibility of the published studies. We summarize the results related to our research questions in a high-level summary that can be used as a taxonomy for classifying future TSP studies.