An Empirical Study on the Impact of Normalized Use-Case Specifications on Traceability

Abstract

Traceability link recovery between requirements and source code is vital for software quality assurance and evolution analysis. Although automated traceability techniques have advanced greatly, the large semantic gap between vague natural-language requirements and precise source code still hinders accurate link recovery. Most existing approaches optimize traceability algorithms yet ignore the inherent quality of requirement descriptions, which prevents fundamental reduction of the semantic gap. This work proposes a requirement-oriented normalization method. Using controlled natural language and large-language-model-based prompt engineering, raw requirements are decomposed and converted into standardized use-case specifications to strengthen semantic representation and mitigate semantic divergence. Evaluated on four public datasets under two typical traceability frameworks, the normalized specifications improve tracing performance for semantically ambiguous raw requirements. However, over-normalization may degrade results for already high-quality requirements closely aligned with code semantics. The results validate source-side requirement normalization as a promising strategy for traceability improvement and reveal its applicable boundaries for practical usage.