Cross-level Requirement Traceability: A Novel Approach Integrating Bag-of-Words and Word Embedding for Enhanced Similarity Functionality

A software requirement is a description of what the software will do and how it will be expected to perform [1]. Requirements vary in degree of detail, starting from business requirements, which are the highest levels of abstraction that focus on the general purpose of the target system, all the way up to software requirements, which precisely describe the characteristics and features required from the system [2]. Depending on these types, the task of requirements traceability varies between linking requirements from one level or linking requirements from different levels (such as linking business requirements to system requirements), which is called cross-level [2]. In general, requirements traceability is defined as "the ability to describe and follow the life of a requirement in both forwards and backward direction through periods of ongoing refinement and iteration" [3]. This task plays a crucial role in the success of software development so that the development team can better understand the needs of customers and system users, and thus be able to design and develop a system that effectively meets those requirements [4].