Jifeng Xuan, He Jiang, Zhilei Ren, Zhongxuan Luo. Solving the Large Scale Next Release Problem with a Backbone Based Multilevel Algorithm. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. Online.
Highlights.
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We present a new algorithm, BMA, to reduce the problem scale of the NRP. In this algorithm, we show how to incorporate the backbone into an approximate algorithm for solving large scale problems. To our knowledge, this is the first application of the backbone in requirements engineering.
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We propose the soft backbone to augment the existing concept of the backbone in both software engineering and combinatorial optimization. In our work, the soft backbone is directly obtained from the instance after the instance reduction by fixing the selected near-optimal customers.
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Instance transfer. We generate new NRP instances from bug repositories of three open source software projects. The bug repositories are mined to cope with the lack of open requirements repositories. This method of mining new instances can provide realistic instances for the empirical research.