Trace links between requirements and code are beneficial for many software engineering tasks such as maintenance, program comprehension, and re-engineering. If trace links are created and used continuously during a project, they need to have high precision and recall to be useful. However, manual trace link creation is cumbersome and existing automatic trace link creation methods are typically only applied retrospectively and to structured requirements. Therefore, they focus on recall and accept manual effort to cope with low precision. Such manual effort is not acceptable continuously. Furthermore, the maintenance of existing links along with changing artefacts in a project is neglected in most automatic trace link creation approaches. Therefore, we developed and evaluated an interaction log-based trace link creation approach IL to continuously provide correct trace links during a project. IL links unstructured requirements specified in an issue tracker and source code managed in a version control system. In the latest version, I L C o m , our approach uses the interactions of developers with files in an integrated development environment and issue identifiers provided in commit messages to create trace links continuously after each commit. In this paper, we present I L C o m , its most recent evaluation study, and a systematic literature review (SLR) about trace link maintenance (TM). We also present a TM process for I L C o m based on two approaches from our SLR. In the evaluation study, we show that precision of I L C o m created links is above 90% and recall almost at 80%. In the SLR, we discuss 16 approaches. Our approach is the first trace link creation approach with very good precision and recall and integrated trace maintenance.

中文翻译：

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基于交互的需求和源代码之间持续可用的跟踪链接的创建和维护

跟踪需求和代码之间的链接有利于许多软件工程任务，例如维护、程序理解和重新设计。如果在项目期间创建并连续使用跟踪链接，则它们需要具有较高的精度和召回率才能有用。然而，手动跟踪链接创建是麻烦的，并且现有的自动跟踪链接创建方法通常仅可追溯地应用于结构化需求。因此，他们专注于召回并接受人工努力来应对低精度。这种手动工作是不能连续接受的。此外，在大多数自动跟踪链接创建方法中，现有链接的维护以及项目中不断变化的人工制品都被忽略了。所以，我们开发并评估了一种基于交互日志的跟踪链接创建方法 IL，以在项目期间持续提供正确的跟踪链接。IL 将问题跟踪器中指定的非结构化需求与版本控制系统中管理的源代码联系起来。在最新版本 ILC om 中，我们的方法使用开发人员与集成开发环境中的文件的交互以及提交消息中提供的问题标识符，以在每次提交后连续创建跟踪链接。在本文中，我们介绍了 ILC om、其最新的评估研究，以及有关跟踪链接维护 (TM) 的系统文献综述 (SLR)。我们还基于来自 SLR 的两种方法提出了 ILC om 的 TM 过程。在评估研究中，我们表明 ILC om 创建的链接的精度高于 90%，召回率几乎达到 80%。在单反中，我们讨论了 16 种方法。我们的方法是第一个跟踪链接创建方法，具有非常好的精确度和召回率以及集成的跟踪维护。