SANAYOJAN : a framework for traceability link recovery between use-cases in software requirement specification and regulatory documents

Abstract

User requirement speci cation (URS) documents written in the form of free-form natural lan- guage text contain system use-case descriptions as one of the elements in the URS. For few application domains, some of the system use-cases in URS de ne services and functionality which needs to comply with regulations pertaining to the application domain. In this paper, we present a multi-step approach to automatically extract system use-cases from URS and construct traceability links between system-uses and appropriate regulations in the regulatory documents. We de ne lexicon-based, syntactic and semantic features to discriminate system use-cases from other elements in the URS. We investigate the application of ve semantic similarity methods implemented in the SEMILAR semantic similarity toolkit to compute similarity between a given system use-case with regulations in a regulatory document. We conduct a series of experiments on real-world data obtained from software projects of a large global Information Technology (IT) services company to validate the proposed approach. Experimental results demonstrate e ec- tiveness (accuracy of 83:3% for system use-case extraction and 72% for constructing traceability links) and limitations of the proposed approach.