Visualizing Software Repositories through Requirements Trace Links

Tracking the status of the requirements throughout the software development cycle is essential to the success of software development projects. Requirements trace links relate requirements with other software development artifacts, indicating the progress on their related requirements. This paper presents a tool that embeds different automated traceability methods and extracts trace links from requirements to issues, pull requests, and commits using keyword matching, TF-IDF vectors, and word vectors. Extracted links are used to create an interactive visualization of the repository in a dashboard for retrospective and real-time analysis. This visualization benefits the managers to track the progress of a project both during or after the development phase and identify the contribution of the developers. Additionally, software engineering educators and students may utilize the visualization of the traces as an indicator of the quality of the requirements and other software development artifacts by outlining the successful or problematic pieces. Our main contribution is the interactive dashboard that utilizes trace links to visualize a software repository to support project management and analysis. We present a preliminary evaluation of the underlying trace link extraction methods and lay out the details of our future evaluation plan. Our replication package contains the code and the evaluation data.