An Automated Ontology-Based Requirements Traceability Technique in Agile Software Development Context

Agile software development (ASD) is a popular process in the software development industry due to its dynamic nature and ability to release software quickly. However, managing the requirements in the ASD context remains a challenging task. This is because frequent changes need to be accommodated in the iterations. Consequently. It is challenging to effectively handle the changes and trace the requirements among artifacts such as sub-user stories, tasks, models, code snippets, and test cases. On the other hand, semi-automated tool support and organizational issues further complicate the requirement management process. Motivated by this, we propose an automated ontology-based technique to address the above-mentioned challenges, which benefits requirements management in agile development. The proposed technique involves tracing requirements, ensuring ontology consistency using competency questions, prioritizing user stories based on business value, and estimating the effort required for each user story. We empirically assessed the performance of the proposed technique by comparing it with baseline approaches using IEEE standards. The attained results indicate that the proposed technique significantly outperforms the baseline approaches. We believe that the proposed technique provides a cost-effective solution for requirement traceability in ASD.