TCC (Tracer-Carrying Code): A Hash-based Pinpointable Traceability Tool using Copy&Paste

Katsuhiko Gondow, Yoshitaka Arahori, Koji Yamamoto, Masahiro Fukuyori, Riyuuichi Umekawa

2018

Abstract

In software development, it is crucially important to effectively capture, record and maintain traceability links in a lightweight way. For example, we often would like to know “what documents (rationale) a programmer referred to, to write this code fragment”, which is supposed to be solved by the traceability links. Most of previous work are retrospective approaches based on information retrieval techniques, but they are likely to generate many false positive traceability links; i.e., their accuracy is low. Unlike retrospective approaches, this paper proposes a novel lightweight prospective approach, which we call TCC (tracer-carrying code). TCC uses a hash value as a tracer (global ID), widely used in distributed version control systems like Git. TCC automatically embeds a TCC tracer into source code as a side-effect of users’ copy&paste operation, so users have no need to explicitly handle tracers (e.g., users have no need to copy&pastes URLs). TCC also caches the referred original text into Git repository. Thus, users can always view the original text later by simply clicking the tracer, even after its URL or file path is changed, or the original text is modified or removed. To show the feasibility of our TCC approach, we developed several TCC prototype systems for Emacs editor, Google Chrome browser, Chrome PDF viewer, and macOS system clipboard. We applied them to the development of a simple iPhone application, which shows a good result; our TCC is quite effective and useful to establish and maintain pinpointable traceability links in a lightweight way. Also several important findings are obtained.

Paper Citation

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Software Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT,
TI - TCC (Tracer-Carrying Code): A Hash-based Pinpointable Traceability Tool using Copy&Paste
SN - 978-989-758-320-9
AU - Gondow K.
AU - Arahori Y.
AU - Yamamoto K.
AU - Fukuyori M.
AU - Umekawa R.
PY - 2018
SP - 221
EP - 232
DO - 10.5220/0006837102210232

in Harvard Style

Gondow K., Arahori Y., Yamamoto K., Fukuyori M. and Umekawa R. (2018). TCC (Tracer-Carrying Code): A Hash-based Pinpointable Traceability Tool using Copy&Paste.In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Software Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT, ISBN 978-989-758-320-9, pages 221-232. DOI: 10.5220/0006837102210232

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icsoft18,
author={Katsuhiko Gondow and Yoshitaka Arahori and Koji Yamamoto and Masahiro Fukuyori and Riyuuichi Umekawa},
title={TCC (Tracer-Carrying Code): A Hash-based Pinpointable Traceability Tool using Copy&Paste},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Software Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT,},
year={2018},
pages={221-232},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006837102210232},
isbn={978-989-758-320-9},
}