Inferring Fine-grained Traceability Links between Javadoc Comment and JUnit Test Code

Abstract

This work presents DOTELINK, a technique that infers fine-grained traceability links between Javadoc comments and JUnit test code. To resolve the limitation of method-level traceability links, DOTELINK establishes links in sentence-level for Javadoc comments and code region-level for JUnit test methods. DOTELINK first segregates each Javadoc comment into multiple sentences, and each JUnit test method into coherent code snippets. And then, DOTELINK associates a Javadoc sentence with a code snippet if their lexical similarity is high. DOTELINK identifies 62.4% of the true fine-grained traceability links in the experiments with 5 real-world projects. We believe that DOTELINK effectively helps developers utilize the duality of the two sorts of requirement representations to improve test quality.