Bilingual software requirements tracing using vector space model

Abstract

In the software engineering world, creating and maintaining relationships between byproducts generated during the software lifecycle is crucial. A typical relation is the one that exists between an item in the requirements document and a block in the subsequent system design, i.e. class in the source code. In many software engineering projects, the requirement documentation is prepared in the language of the developers, whereas developers prefer to use the English language in the software development process. In this paper, we use the vector space model to extract traceability links between the requirements written in one language (Turkish) and the implementations of classes in another language (English). The experiments show that, by using a generic translator such as Google translate, we can obtain promising results, which can also be improved by using comment info in the source code.