| Kurzfassung
|
Documentation plays a crucial role in software engineering by supporting development, maintenance, and evolution. A structured form of documenting design decisions is Architectural Decision Records (ADRs), which concisely capture architectural choices. However, like most documentation, ADRs are often disconnected from related project artifacts. Traceability Link Recovery (TLR) aims to reconstruct such links automatically, yet it has not previously been applied specifically to ADRs, nor have benchmarks existed for this purpose. This work addresses that gap by applying established TLR approaches to ADRs and introducing the first gold-standard dataset linking ADRs to source code and software architecture documentation at multiple levels of granularity. Results show that ADR traceability is feasible, with file-level recovery yielding more stable precision-recall trade-offs than sentence-level recovery. Effectiveness depends on artifact type, granularity, and candidate selection, highlighting challenges and opportunities for improving ADR traceability.
|