An automated hint generation approach for supporting the evolution of requirements specifications

Abstract

Updating the requirements specification during software evolution is a manual and expensive task. Therefore, software engineers usually choose to apply modifications directly to the code and leave the requirements unchanged. This leads to the loss of the knowledge contained in the requirements documents and thus limits the evolvability of a software system. In this paper, we propose to employ the co-evolution of the code and its test suite to preserve or restore the alignment between implementation and requirements: when a change has been applied to the code, subsequent changes in the test suite as well as failing tests are analyzed and used to automatically generate hints about the affected requirements and how they should be changed. These hints support the engineer in maintaining the requirements specification and thus ease the further evolution of the software system.