Automated Recovery and Visualization of Test-to-Code Traceability (TCT) Links: An Evaluation

Abstract

In the software development process, traceability links between unit tests and code are not explicitly maintained, and dependencies in most cases are manually identified. As a result, a large amount of effort and time is required during the comprehension process to establish the links between these artifacts. Although there are several methods that can infer such links based on different phenomenons, these methods usually produce different set of traceability links. This work expands upon previous traceability link recovery and visualization studies by implementing a combination of traceability recovery methods that automatically retrieve the links, and visualizing them to help developers to overview the links inferred by various recovery techniques, and also to select the right relations for analyses. The results of the usability study show that the visualization model presented herein can effectively support browsing, comprehension, and maintenance of Test-to Code Traceability (TCT) links in a system with enhanced efficiency, as well as visualization of TCT links from multiple sources is better than a visualization of single source of traceability links.