Requirements tracing: discovering related documents through artificial pheromones and term proximity

Requirements traceability is an important undertaking as part of ensuring the quality of software in the early stages of the Software Development Life Cycle. This paper demonstrates the applicability of swarm intelligence to the requirements tracing problem using pheromone communication and a focus on the common text around linking terms or words in order to find related textual documents. Through the actions and contributions of each individual member of the swarm, the swarm as a whole exposes relationships between documents in a collective manner. Two techniques have been examined, simple swarm and pheromone swarm. The techniques have been validated using two real-world datasets from two problem domains.