Integrating ontologies,model driven,and CNL in a multi-viewed approach for requirements engineering

Research in requirements engineering (RE) has been growing in the last few years. RE researchers are generally concerned with a set of open issues such as: (i) the need for a well-defined process to identify and specify the requirements scope, (ii) suitable mechanisms to support communication among different stakeholders and development teams involved in the RE process, (iii) mechanisms to deal with the inherent volatility of requirements, and (iv) the need for a traceability scheme to help managing requirements in the downstream phases of the development process. In this work, we address some of these open issues by proposing the use of an iterative and incremental model-driven RE process combined with the employment of different notations such as controlled natural language and ontology in each activity of RE process. Based on the argument that there is no single notation suitable to represent requirements from the different perspectives of all the stakeholders and development teams, we propose a RE process encompassing different views, representing each perspective. This paper describes the proposed process, its tool support, and presents a controlled experiment that illustrates the proposal and evaluates its benefits.     

Stakeholders in Global Requirements Engineering: Lessons Learned from Practice

Due to its communication and collaboration-intensive nature, as well as inherent interaction with most other development processes, the practice of requirements engineering is becoming a key challenge in global software engineering (GSE). In distributed projects, cross-functional stakeholder groups must specify and manage requirements across cultural, time-zone, and organizational boundaries. This creates a unique set of problems, not only when an organization opens new development subsidiaries across the world but also when software development is a multiorganizational business affair. We need innovative processes and technologies to manage stakeholders' expectations and interaction in global projects. This article reports on the state of the practice, drawn from industrial empirical studies, of stakeholders' interaction in global RE. The article revisits stakeholders' needs in global RE, discusses the challenges they face in distributed interaction, and offers practical advice to alleviate these challenges, as distilled from empirical studies of GSE practice     

RE challenges in multi-site software development organisations

The increasing globalisation of the software industry demands an investigation of requirements engineering (RE) in multi-site software development organisations. Requirements engineering is a task difficult enough when done locally—but it is even more difficult when cross-functional stakeholder groups specify requirements across cultural, language and time zone boundaries. This paper reports on a field study that investigated RE challenges introduced by the stakeholders' geographical distribution in a multi-site organisation. The goal was to examine RE practices in global software development, and to formulate recommendations for improvement as well as to provide directions for future research on methods and tools. Based on the empirical evidence, we have constructed a model of how remote communication and knowledge management, cultural diversity and time differences negatively impact requirements gathering, negotiations and specifications. Findings reveal that aspects such as a lack of a common understanding of requirements, together with a reduced awareness of a working local context, a trust level and an ability to share work artefacts significantly challenge the effective collaboration of remote stakeholders in negotiating a set of requirements that satisfies geographically distributed customers. The paper concludes with recommendations for improving RE practices in this setting.

多视点中不一致性的处理：一种基于认知逻辑的方法

衡量一个软件系统是否成功,一个基本的要素就是看该软件系统是否满足了用户的要求。软件系统需求工程(RE)就是一个通过标识涉众及其需求并将其文档化以便于进行分析的过程。RE是一个跨学科,以人为中心的过程。多视点需求工程是需求工程的一个分支。多视点需求工程就是希望复杂系统中的不同参与者分别从自己的角度出发对预期系统进行描述,从而形成更完备的需求规约。由于多视点方法的这种特性,导致多个涉众有可能对同一问题进行描述,从而形成重叠的需求。这些重叠的需求就是涉众之间的公共知识,对公共知识的不同解释是导致需求规约中不一致问题的根源。不一致性是多视点需求工程中一个必须解决的问题。本文提出了基于问题域的多视点需求建模框架,并利用认知逻辑对该框架进行解释和推理,希望可以用形式化的方法来发现和解决存在于不同视点间的不一致性。     

From conceptual modelling to requirements engineering

Conceptual modelling is situated in the broader view of information systems requirements engineering. Requirements Engineering (RE) explores the objectives of different stakeholders and the activities carried out by them to meet these objectives in order to derive purposeful system requirements and therefore lead to better quality systems, i.e., systems that meet the requirements of their users. Thus RE product models use concepts for modelling these instead of concepts like data, process, events, etc., used in conceptual models. Since the former are more stable than the latter, requirements engineering manages change better. The paper gives the rationale for extending traditional conceptual models and introduces some RE product models. Furthermore, in contrast to conceptual modelling, requirements engineering lays great stress on the engineering process employed. The paper introduces some RE process models and considers their effect on tool support. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Portraying the practice of decision-making in requirements engineering: a case of large scale bespoke development

Complex decision-making is a prominent aspect of requirements engineering (RE) and the need for improved decision support for RE decision-makers has been identified by a number of authors in the research literature. A first step toward better decision support in requirements engineering is to understand multifaceted decision situations of decision-makers. In this paper, the focus is on RE decision-making in large scale bespoke development. The decision situation of RE decision-makers on a subsystem level has been studied at a systems engineering company and is depicted in this paper. These situations are described in terms of, e.g., RE decision matters, RE decision-making activities, and RE decision processes. Factors that affect RE decision-makers are also identified.     

基于信息特征的需求开发与管理研究

如何荻取用户的真正需求是需求工程的难点.需求工程是创造性的高层次知识活动,根据知识等级层次,信息最接近于事实且涉及专业知识最少.以信息方式交流需求具有容易理解的优势,便于减少和消除人们因知识背景不同而产生的交流困难.应用信息特征探讨了几点有效提高需求开发与管理效率的对策.     

An Industrial Case Study on Distributed Prioritisation in Market-Driven Requirements Engineering for Packaged Software

When developing packaged software, which is sold ‘off-the-shelf’ on a worldwide marketplace, it is essential to collect needs and opportunities from different market segments and use this information in the prioritisation of requirements for the next software release. This paper presents an industrial case study where a distributed prioritisation process is proposed, observed and evaluated. The stakeholders in the requirements prioritisation process include marketing offices distributed around the world. A major objective of the distributed prioritisation is to gather and highlight the differences and similarities in the requirement priorities of the different market segments. The evaluation through questionnaires shows that the stakeholders found the process useful. The paper also presents novel approaches to visualise the priority distribution among stakeholders, together with measures on disagreement and satisfaction. Product management found the proposed charts valuable as decision support when selecting requirements for the next release, as they revealed unforeseen differences among stakeholder priorities. Conclusions on stakeholder tactics are provided and issues of further research are identified, including ways of addressing identified challenges.     

Managing the requirements engineering process

Process management is a crucial issue in developing information or computer systems. Theories of software development process management suggest that the process should be supported and managed based on what the process really is. However, our learning from an action research study reveals that the requirements engineering (RE) process differs significantly from that which the current literature tends to describe. The process is not a systematic, smooth and incremental evolution of the requirements model, but involves occasional simplification and restructuring of the requirements model. This revised understanding of the RE process suggests a new challenge to both the academic and industrial communities, demanding new process management approaches. In this paper, we present our understanding of the RE process and its implications for process management.     

What lies behind requirements? A quality assessment of statement grounds in requirements elicitation

Software Quality Journal - In requirements engineering (RE), an early yet critical activity consists in eliciting the requirements from various stakeholders, who usually have different assumptions,...     

Formal methods and requirements engineering: Challenges and synergies

Formal methods (FM) are already making important contributions to both theory and practice in the field of requirements engineering (RE). This article presents an overview of work in this area drawing on discussions and presentations which took place at an international workshop held in December 1996. Our aim is first to outline the current demonstrated capability of FM to support RE and then to present some of the recent developments which seem most likely to result in practical methods in the near future. Some of the significant themes identified are: the use of theorem-provers and model-checking tools, the application of formally-based requirements acquisition strategies, development of reusable software architectures which can anchor requirements elaboration, and formal treatment of inconsistency and the use of multiple notations.     

Formal reasoning for analyzing goal models that evolve over time

Requirements Engineering - In early-phase requirements engineering, modeling stakeholder goals and intentions helps stakeholders understand the problem context and evaluate tradeoffs, by exploring...     

Wiki-Based Stakeholder Participation in Requirements Engineering

Requirements elicitation and documentation are complex activities. So, not only the requirements themselves but also the people involved and the means for managing the requirements will evolve during the project. For example, it might be necessary to add RE personnel, to document templates, or to change the requirements classification scheme. In summary, especially in participative RE, the underlying platform as well the RE approach must be flexible. As the well-known Wikipedia shows, wikis provide a flexible platform for asynchronous collaboration to create content in general. In this article, we investigate how to adapt this approach to support active stakeholder participation in RE. We include a document structure for wiki-based RE and discuss potential problems and solutions based on our experience     

Stakeholder Risk Assessment: An Outcome-Based Approach

Managing software projects can often degrade into fighting fires lit by the embers of unrecognized and unmanaged risks. Stakeholders are a recognized source of significant software project risk, but few researchers have focused on providing a practical method for identifying specific project stakeholders. Furthermore, no methods provide guidance in identifying and managing project risks arising from those stakeholders. We developed the outcome-based stakeholder risk assessment model to provide this practical guidance. OBSRAM offers the project team a step-by-step approach to identifying stakeholders during requirements engineering, identifying stakeholder influences on the project, identifying the project's impact on stakeholders, and assessing the risks that their potential negative responses pose. We illustrate OBSRAM using a case study of a simulated airline-crew-scheduling system project that aims to reduce aircraft ground turnaround time to 30 minutes or less     

An exploratory study of architectural effects on requirements decisions

The question of the “manner in which an existing software architecture affects requirements decision-making” is considered important in the research community; however, to our knowledge, this issue has not been scientifically explored. We do not know, for example, the characteristics of such architectural effects. This paper describes an exploratory study on this question. Specific types of architectural effects on requirements decisions are identified, as are different aspects of the architecture together with the extent of their effects. This paper gives quantitative measures and qualitative interpretation of the findings. The understanding gained from this study has several implications in the areas of: project planning and risk management, requirements engineering (RE) and software architecture (SA) technology, architecture evolution, tighter integration of RE and SA processes, and middleware in architectures. Furthermore, we describe several new hypotheses that have emerged from this study, that provide grounds for future empirical work. This study involved six RE teams (of university students), whose task was to elicit new requirements for upgrading a pre-existing banking software infrastructure. The data collected was based on a new meta-model for requirements decisions, which is a bi-product of this study.     

ERP requirements engineering practice: lessons learned

Standard off-the-shelf requirements engineering processes have become a key to conceptualizing any integrated, corporate-wide solution based on packaged enterprise resource planning software. A generic RE model offers defined processes, suggests process stakeholders, specifies steps to accomplish tasks, indicates task dependencies, and provides standard tool support for ERP RE. Essentially, any off-the-shelf RE process is about composition and reconciliation: you start with a general set of business process and data requirements, then explore standard ERP functionality to see how closely it matches your organization's process and data needs.     

Effective Hybrid Content-Based Collaborative Filtering Approach for Requirements Engineering

Requirements engineering (RE) is among the most valuable and critical processes in software development. The quality of this process significantly affects the success of a software project. An important step in RE is requirements elicitation, which involves collecting project-related requirements from different sources. Repositories of reusable requirements are typically important sources of an increasing number of reusable software requirements. However, the process of searching such repositories to collect valuable project-related requirements is time-consuming and difficult to perform accurately. Recommender systems have been widely recognized as an effective solution to such problem. Accordingly, this study proposes an effective hybrid content-based collaborative filtering recommendation approach. The proposed approach will support project stakeholders in mitigating the risk of missing requirements during requirements elicitation by identifying related requirements from software requirement repositories. The experimental results on the RALIC dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach considerably outperforms baseline collaborative filtering-based recommendation methods in terms of prediction accuracy and coverage in addition to mitigating the data sparsity and cold-start item problems.     

Determining Stakeholder Needs in the Workplace: How Mobile Technologies Can Help

Mobile technologies offer exciting new opportunities to improve important requirements processes. However, providing usable, useful mobile requirements engineering (RE) tools is challenging due to mobile devices' limitations and limited knowledge on successfully using mobile RE tools in the field. You can use the reported lessons learned as an initial guide to develop and use mobile RE tools successfully. We believe that mobile RE tools will complement rather than replace traditional approaches, and the combination of context-aware and conventional elicitation and negotiation approaches has the potential to improve the quality of requirements. Evaluation studies also revealed several issues, including biases arising from the limited information available on mobile devices; integrated training, process guidance, and tool support for analysts; and guidance for end users to discover and document their own requirements. Further work in the mobile RE field is needed to address these issues. Mobile RE tools help elicit stakeholder heeds in the workplace. The authors discuss lessons learned that practitioners can adopt and use in their work