SpojitR: Intelligently Link Development Artifacts

Abstract

Traceability has been acknowledged as an important part of the software development process and is considered relevant when performing tasks such as change impact and coverage analysis. With the growing popularity of issue tracking systems and version control systems developers began including the unique identifiers of issues to commit messages. The goal of this message tagging is to trace related artifacts and eventually establish project-wide traceability. However, the trace creation process is still performed manually and not free of errors, i. e. developers may forget to tag their commit with an issue id. The prototype spojitR is designed to assist developers in tagging commit messages and thus (semi-) automatically creating trace links between commits and an issue they are working on. When no tag is present in a commit message, spojitR offers the developer a short recommendation list of potential issue ids to tag the commit message. We evaluated our tool using an open-source project hosted by the Apache Software Foundation. The source code, a demonstration, and a video about spojitR is available online: https://github.com/SECSY-Group/spojitr.