An Approach for Discovering Traceability Links between Regulatory Documents and Source Code Through User-Interface Labels
This addresses the challenge for software vendors in regulated domains to ensure compliance, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing traceability concepts with a specific focus on user-interface elements.
The paper tackles the problem of maintaining traceability links between regulatory documents and source code in regulated software domains by leveraging user-interface labels, based on the intuition that both share terminology and key regulatory information. The evaluation in the green building domain with a domain expert shows that the recovered links are accurate.
In application domains that are regulated, software vendors must maintain traceability links between the regulatory items and the code base implementing them. In this paper, we present a traceability approach based on the intuition that the regulatory documents and the user-interface of the corresponding software applications are very close. First, they use the same terminology. Second, most important regulatory pieces of information appear in the graphical user-interface because the end-users in those application domains care about the regulation (by construction). We evaluate our approach in the domain of green building. The evaluation involves a domain expert, lead architect of a commercial product within this area. The evaluation shows that the recovered traceability links are accurate.