Traceability Network Analysis: A Case Study of Links in Issue Tracking Systems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Traceability links between software artifacts serve as an invaluable resource for reasoning about software products and their development process. Most conventional methods for capturing traceability are based on pair-wise artifact relations such as trace matrices or navigable links between two directly related artifacts. However, this limited view of trace links ignores the propagating effect of artifact connections as well as the trace link properties at a project level. In this work, we propose the use of network structures to provide another perspective from which reasoning on a collective of trace events is possible. We explore various network analysis techniques in the issue tracking system of sixty-six open source projects. Our observation reveals two salient properties of the traceability network, i.e. scale free and triadic closure. These properties provide a strong indication of the applicability of network analysis tools and can be used to identify and examine important "hub" issues. As a stepping stone, these properties can further support project status analysis and link type prediction. As a proof-of-concept, we demonstrate the effectiveness of applying the triadic closure property to link type prediction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".