About

The following library is a tracing engine originally developed alongside my thesis paper Leveraging Intermediate Artifacts to improve Trace Link Retrieval. In this paper we discuss a set of techniques that retrieve trace links either by directly comparing source and target artifacts, transitively comparing the source artifact to all intermediate artifacts, or a hybrid which combines both direct and transitive techniques.

Installation

I have included a script install.sh that will:

• Install the python virtual environment and all its dependencies
• Create .env file containing the absolute path of the engine.
• Create cache folder used to be able to cache techniques.

Documentation

API function documentation can be found here: https://traceabilitytracer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Usage

There is a proxy class for common tracing operations under api.tracer.Tracer

from api.tables.metric_table import MetricTable
from api.tracer import Tracer

dataset_name = "EasyClinic"
direct_technique = "(. (LSI NT) (0 2))"
transitive_technique = "(x (PCA GLOBAL) ((. (LSI NT) (0 1)) (. (LSI NT) (1 2))))"
hybrid_technique = f"(o (MAX) ({direct_technique} {transitive_technique}))"

technique_definitions = [
    ("direct", direct_technique),
    ("transitive", transitive_technique),
    ("hybrid", hybrid_technique),
]

metric_table = MetricTable()
tracer = Tracer()

for t_name, t_def in technique_definitions:
    t_metrics = tracer.get_metrics(dataset_name, t_def)
    metric_table.add(t_metrics, {"name": t_name})

print(metric_table.table)

   query_id       map       auc         lag        name
0         0  0.686343  0.749641  259.621984      direct
1         0  0.432479  0.645247  367.879357  transitive
2         0  0.698789  0.786151  221.761394      hybrid

We notice that these metrics are summary metrics because the entire set of trace links is treated as a single query.

Language Definition

To define technique we use a lisp-like language parser where techniques take the following form:

([technique_symbol] ([variants...]) ([components...]))

Direct Techniques

Symbol: .
Variants: [AlgebraicModel, TraceType]
Components: [Source Artifact Level, Target Artifact Level]

Transitive Techniques

Symbol: x
Variants: [PathAggregationMethod, ScalingMethod]
Components: [UpperTechnique, LowerTechnique]

Hybrid Techniques

Symbol: o
Variants: [TechniqueAggregationMethod]
Components: [ComponentTechniques...]

How to Contribute

All supporting developers are expected to use the pull request system which performs linting, unit tests, and test coverage checks before allowing potential merges. These checks can be run locally with:

make checklist