A Systematic Literature Review of Issue-Based Requirement Traceability

Issue reports are software artifacts that often specify the changed requirements of software systems. As software systems evolve according to these changed requirements, issue reports have become the essential artifacts that should be covered by requirement traceability. While researchers have developed automatic approaches for establishing the traceability links of issue reports, no papers have surveyed these approaches. In this paper, we conduct a systematic literature review of issue-based requirement traceability. We searched for articles published in renowned conferences and journals in the software engineering field from 2011 to 2022. From 1,347 initial articles, we identified 40 relevant articles. We investigated four aspects of issue-based traceability: problems, artifact pairs, techniques, and evaluation targets. Our findings are as follows. First, the challenges of issue-based requirement traceability are relevant to accuracy, effort, support, information, and trustworthiness. Second, issue reports are linked to commits, source code, user reviews, and test cases. Third, the studies mainly adopted machine learning and information retrieval techniques to generate and recover trace links. Finally, the main evaluation targets were open-source projects, but open datasets were also provided.