LiSSA

LiSSA (Linking Software System Artifacts) is a retrieval-augmented, LLM-based approach that aims to be generic across artifact types. The key idea is to use a Large Language Model (LLM) together with information retrieval (IR) to find trace links. For a given source artifact (e.g. a requirement or a sentence in documentation), LiSSA first uses IR techniques to retrieve a small set of potentially relevant target artifacts (code files, model elements, etc.). It then queries the LLM with the retrieved context to generate or suggest the most likely trace link.

• Scope: LiSSA was tested on multiple tasks including requirements→code, documentation→code, and architecture-docs→models. The same RAG process is applied in each case, making it a one-size-fits-many solution.
• Effectiveness: In experiments, LiSSA significantly outperformed state-of-the-art tools on the code-centric tasks. For example, it showed much higher accuracy when linking requirements to code than prior methods.