Requirements Socio-Technical Graphs for Managing Practitioners’ Traceability Questions

To understand requirements traceability in practice, we contribute, in this paper, an automated approach to identifying questions from requirements repositories and examining their answering status. Applying our approach to 345 open-source projects results in 20622 questions, among which 53% and 15% are classified as successfully and unsuccessfully answered, respectively. By constructing a novel requirements socio-technical graph, we explore the impact of stakeholder-artifact relationships on traceability. The number of people, surprisingly, has little influence compared to other graph-theoretic measures like the clustering coefficient. Based on the repository mining results, we formulate a set of novel hypotheses about traceability. A case study supports some hypotheses while offering new insights.