Exploring Traceability Links via Issues for Detailed Requirements Coverage Reports

The coverage of requirements is a fundamental need throughout the software life cycle. It gives project managers an indication how well the software meets expected requirements. A precondition for the process is to link requirements with project artifacts, like test cases. There are various (semi-) automated methods deriving traceable relations between requirements and test scenarios aiming to counteract time consuming and error-prone manual approaches. However, even if traceability links are correctly established coverage is calculated based on passed test scenarios without taking into account the overall code base written to realize the requirement in the first place.In this paper we introduce the "Requirements-Testing-Coverage" (ReTeCo) approach that automatically establishes links between requirements and test cases through source code lines which a) have been written in the context of an issue as part of a linked requirement, b) have been committed into a version control system, and c) produce code coverage results. Since the approach takes into account source code lines it is able to calculate coverage reports on a fine-grained contextual level rather than on the result of high-level artifacts.We show the feasibility of the approach and initial evaluation results using the code base and test scenarios of large open source projects.