NASA Logo

NTRS

NTRS - NASA Technical Reports Server

Back to Results
Partial Automation of Requirements TracingRequirements Tracing on Target (RETRO) is software for after-the-fact tracing of textual requirements to support independent verification and validation of software. RETRO applies one of three user-selectable information-retrieval techniques: (1) term frequency/inverse document frequency (TF/IDF) vector retrieval, (2) TF/IDF vector retrieval with simple thesaurus, or (3) keyword extraction. One component of RETRO is the graphical user interface (GUI) for use in initiating a requirements-tracing project (a pair of artifacts to be traced to each other, such as a requirements spec and a design spec). Once the artifacts have been specified and the IR technique chosen, another component constructs a representation of the artifact elements and stores it on disk. Next, the IR technique is used to produce a first list of candidate links (potential matches between the two artifact levels). This list, encoded in Extensible Markup Language (XML), is optionally processed by a filtering component designed to make the list somewhat smaller without sacrificing accuracy. Through the GUI, the user examines a number of links and returns decisions (yes, these are links; no, these are not links). Coded in XML, these decisions are provided to a "feedback processor" component that prepares the data for the next application of the IR technique. The feedback reduces the incidence of erroneous candidate links. Unlike related prior software, RETRO does not require the user to assign keywords, and automatically builds a document index.
Document ID
20110013638
Acquisition Source
Goddard Space Flight Center
Document Type
Other - NASA Tech Brief
Authors
Hayes, Jane
(Kentucky Univ. KY, United States)
Dekhtyar, Alex
(Kentucky Univ. KY, United States)
Sundaram, Senthil
(Kentucky Univ. KY, United States)
Vadlamudi, Sravanthi
(Kentucky Univ. KY, United States)
Date Acquired
August 25, 2013
Publication Date
December 1, 2006
Publication Information
Publication: NASA Tech Briefs, December 2006
Subject Category
Man/System Technology And Life Support
Report/Patent Number
GSC-14976-1
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Public Use Permitted.
No Preview Available