DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14445642
title: Online Appendix of the paper "Locating Requirements in Backlog Items: Content Analysis and Experiments with Large Language Models"

description: Online Appendix of the paper “Locating Requirements in Backlog Items: Content Analysis and Experiments with Large Language Models”

In the paper, we examine how requirements are documented in backlogs stored in issue tracking systems and explore automated techniques to identify and classify requirements backlog items.The appendix contains two main folders, each related to one research question.

Folder: Part 1

This folder contains material related to RQ1. The notebook get_results.ipynb presents the results based on the datasets produced by the files in the subfolder tagged data. This notebook generates the following files:RQ1.1.xlsx, RQ1.2a.xlsx, RQ1.2b.xlsx, RQ1.2c.xlsx, RQ1.3.xlsx.



RQ1.1.xlsx presents the raw data of table 3

RQ1.2a.xlsx contains the data of table 4

RQ1.2b.xlsx contains the data of table 5

RQ1.2c.xlsx contains the data of table 6

RQ1.3.xlsx reports the raw data of table 7


This notebook utilizes the file two_codes_per_req - OSS.xlsx to produce one of the result tables. The Excel file contains the number of text segments tagged with two different codes/categories (per project).

Subfolder “Coding guidelines”.

The file scheme issue requirements.pdf defines the tagging guidelines we used for annotating the datasets.

Subfolder “Tagged data”.

The script merge_nvivo_datasets.py combines the Nvivo files in the subfolder “Tagged data/Category per item” and creates an Excel file that indicates which categories occur per item (0 or 1). The script link_codes_to_df.py uses the file exported by merge_nvivo_datasets.py to indicate per item whether a category occurs more than once.

Subsubfolder “Nvivo_extracted_v2”.

For each of the OSS projects, we include an exported Excel file from Nvivo with the tagged categories for each item (indicates only 1 or 0).

Subsubfolder “original_samples”.

For each of the OSS projects, we add the original sample items, including data on issue type and creation data.

Subsubfolder “raw tags”.

For each combination (type x granularity) we tagged (see the schema in the coding schema folder), we attach an exported txt file from Nvivo with the tagged text. There are 10 files (for each of the combinations + a file for the motivation tags), and each file contains the tagged text of the open source projects. For confidentiality reasons, we cannot share the tagged text of the proprietary projects.

Folder: Part 2

This folder consists of material related to RQ2. This folder contains three subfolders.

Main folder.

The main folder contains convert_items_type.ipynb, label_data.py and the Figure A - example segmentation.pdf.The pdf file Figure A - example segmentation.pdf provides an example of how the segmentation process is performed. The file label_data.py uses the data from part 1 (the raw tags and original samples), segments the items and links the raw tags to each segment. This results in a file segments_final.xlsx, in which each row represents a segment with columns indicating whether it contains a particular tag (1 or 0 per category). The file convert_items_type.ipynb converts the multiple tag columns to a single tag column for the classification task. It can export it to an Excel file named: segments_types_final.xlsx.

Subfolder “balance_data”

This subfolder contains the file sample_data.ipynb. This file uses the files segments_final.xlsx and segments_types_final.xlsx in the main directory and creates two balanced datasets segments_balanced.xlsx and segments_types_balanced.xlsx for identifying and classifying requirements, respectively.

Subfolder “Task1”

This subfolder contains the material related to Task 1. It contains two subfolders decoder_models and encoder_models.

Main Folder

The root folder contains Figure B - heatmap.pdf, RQ2-1-precision-recall.pdf (Figure 5) and get_req_results.ipynb.The file get_req_results.ipynb extracts the performance data from the decoder_models and encoder_models subfolders and produces the table results plus figures for Task1. To accomplish this, it also performs the hypothesis tests using the Python package SciPy.

Subsubfolder “decoder_models”

This subfolder contains:



gpt_f1.xlxs: raw F1 score per model per project

gpt_precision.xlsx: raw precision score per model per project

gpt_recall.xlsx: raw recall score per model per project

prompt_chatgpt.txt: prompt used for ChatGPT

prompt.txt: prompt used for Mistral and Llama


Subfolder “encoder_models”

The root folder contains the files train_bert.py, train_roberta.py and utils.py. The file train_bert.py executes the training for BERT and BERT_2. The file train_roberta.py performs the training for RoBERTa and RoBERTa_2. Both files use the file utils.py to use the training functions.



Subfolder BERT: this folder contains the performance of BERT per project: Accuracy, Precision, Recall, TP, FP, FN

Subfolder BERT_2: this folder contains the performance of BERT_2 by project: Accuracy, Precision, Recall, TP, FP, FN

Subfolder Roberta: this folder contains the performance of RoBERTa by project: Accuracy, Precision, Recall, TP, FP, FN

Subfolder Roberta_2: this folder contains the performance of RoBERTa_2 by project: Accuracy, Precision, Recall, TP, FP, FN


subfolder: Task2

This subfolder consists of the materials related to Task2. It contains two subfolders decoder_models and encoder_models.

Main folder

The root folder contains Figure C - heatmap.pdf, RQ2-2-precision-recall.pdf (Figure 5) and get_req_results_type.ipynb.The file get_req_results_type.ipynb extracts the performance data from the decoder_models and encoder_models subfolders, and produces the table results plus figures for Task2. To accomplish this, it also performs hypothesis testing using the Python package SciPy.

Subsubfolder “decoder_models”

This subfolder contains:



gpt_f1_types.xlxs: raw F1 score per model per project

gpt_precision_types.xlsx: raw precision score per model per project

gpt_recall_types.xlsx: raw recall score per model per project

prompt_type_chatgpt.txt: prompt used for ChatGPT

prompt_type.txt: prompt used for Mistral and Llama


Subsubfolder “encoder_models”

The root directory contains the files train_bert_type.py, train_roberta_type.py and utils_type.py. The file train_bert_type.py performs the training for BERT and BERT_2. The file train_roberta_type.py performs the training for RoBERTa and RoBERTa_2. Both files use the file utils_type.py to use the training functions.



Subfolder BERT: this folder contains the performance of BERT per project: Accuracy, Precision, Recall, TP, FP, FN

Subfolder BERT_2: this folder contains the performance of BERT_2 by project: Accuracy, Precision, Recall, TP, FP, FN

Subfolder Roberta: this folder contains the performance of RoBERTa by project: Accuracy, Precision, Recall, TP, FP, FN

Subfolder Roberta_2: this folder contains the performance of RoBERTa_2 by project: Accuracy, Precision, Recall, TP, FP, FN


Reference to data

L. Montgomery, C. Lüders, & W. Maalej (2022, May). An alternative issue tracking dataset of public jira repositories. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (pp. 73-77).

V. Tawosi, A. Al-Subaihin, R. Moussa, & F. Sarro (2022, May). A versatile dataset of agile open source software projects. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (pp. 707-711).

Reference

A.T. van Can & F. Dalpiaz (2024). Locating Requirements in Backlog Items: Content Analysis and Experiments with Large Language Models. Information and Software Technology