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The following topics are dealt with: requirements engineering; change management; social system; formal specification; formal verification; embedded system; requirements elicitation and software life cycle.
Requirements changes frequently occur at any time of a software development process and their management is a crucial issue to develop software of high quality. Meanwhile, recently goal-oriented analysis techniques are being put into practice to elicit requirements. In this situation, the change management of goal graphs and its support is necessary. This paper presents two topics related to change...
Without distinguishing unstable from stable features and anticipating likely new features, building evolvability into software systems can be time-consuming and, above all, ineffective. This paper introduces a method based on a software evolution model whose goal is to help requirements engineers and product managers identify the unstable features of an embedded system and anticipate its potential...
An accurate set of traceability relations between software development artifacts is desirable to support evolutionary development. However, even where an initial set of traceability relations has been established, their maintenance during subsequent development activities is time consuming and error prone, which results in traceability decay. This paper focuses solely on the problem of maintaining...
Within the context of business processes design and deployment we introduce and illustrate the use of goal models for capturing compliance requirements applicable over business processes configurations. More specifically we explain how a goal-oriented approach can be used together with the ISO/IEC 15504 standard in order to provide a formal framework according to which the compliance of business processes...
U.S. laws and regulations are designed to support broad societal goals, such as accessibility, privacy and safety. To demonstrate that a product complies with these goals, businesses need to identify and refine legal requirements into product requirements and integrate the product requirements into their ongoing product design and testing processes. We report on an industry case study in which product...
Requirements interdependencies create technical dependencies among project members that generally belong to different functional groups in an organization, but who need to coordinate activities during processes of requirements change management. Effective knowledge management is needed to disseminate information on requirement changes across teams working on interdependent requirements to avoid mis-interpretations...
Soft issues, such as politics and people's feelings, are often cited as problems in the RE process. A method aimed at improving elicitation and analysis of such 'soft' issues is described. The method consists of a taxonomy of users' values, motivations and emotions, with process guidance for eliciting and analysing these issues for the RE process.
Electronic service bundles such as Internet access and voice over IP become increasingly important for the economy. The requirements engineering problem is how to compose an e-service bundle such that consumer needs are met optimally, and the suppliers provide the services economically sustainable. We propose a technique to match a consumer need with a multi-supplier bundle of commercial e-services,...
In their seminal paper in the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, Zave and Jackson established a core ontology for requirements engineering (RE) and used it to formulate the "requirements problem", thereby defining what it means to successfully complete RE. Given that stakeholders of the system-to-be communicate the information needed to perform RE, we show that Zave...
This paper points to problems in the joint use of the use case model and the domain model in the system requirements definition phase. It proposes a specialization of use cases called info cases, from which a domain model can be derived. Semi-formal rules are presented for the derivation, showing evidence of the integration between these models.
RE use in industry is hampered by a poor understanding of RE practices and their benefits. Teaching RE at the university level is therefore an important endeavor. This education can ideally be provided at the university level as an integrated part of developing the requisite RE and software engineering technical skills, shortly before students become engineers and enter the workforce. However, much...
This paper reports on the design and use of a board game to introduce students and organizations to Requirements Engineering (RE) good practices. Our position is that the awareness and adoption of RE practices can be facilitated via simple, low-cost and creative gameplay as part of an educational or training program. This paper describes a game called RE-O-Poly that was developed to introduce and...
Requirements engineers with many years of experience have a distinct perspective on the field. To sample this knowledge, we interviewed 34 requirements researchers and practitioners, each with up to 42 years of experience. We used open-ended, structured interviews in which we asked them to reflect on their experiences and professional development as requirements engineers over their careers. Several...
Requirements engineering for multiple customers, each of whom have competing and often conflicting priorities, raises issues of negotiation, mediation and conflict resolution. This paper uses a multi-objective optimisation approach to support investigation of the trade-offs in various notions of fairness between multiple customers. Results are presented to validate the approach using two real-world...
In early phases of the software cycle, requirements prioritization necessarily relies on the specified requirements and on predictions of benefit and cost of individual requirements. This paper presents results of a systematic review of literature, which investigates how existing methods approach the problem of requirements prioritization based on benefit and cost. From this review, it derives a set...
Missing or imprecise requirements can lead stakeholders to make incorrect assumptions. A "not a problem" defect report (NaP) describes a software behavior that a stakeholder regards as a problem while the developer believes this behavior is acceptable and chooses not to take any action. As a result, a NaP wastes the time of the development team because resources are spent analyzing the problem...
Service-centric software systems offer new opportunities for requirements processes. This paper reports a new tool designed to increase the completeness of system requirements using information about designs and implementations of web services. It presents an algorithm for retrieving web services in domains that are analogical to a current requirements problem, to support creative thinking about...
We introduce an extractive approach to building a product line's requirements assets. We define the functional requirements profiles (FRPs) according to the linguistic characterization of a domain's action-oriented concerns, and show that FRPs can be extracted from a document based on domain-aware lexical affinities that bear a 'verb - direct object' relation. The validated FRPs are then amenable...
Requirements related problems, especially those originating from inadequacies in the human-intensive task of eliciting stakeholderspsila needs and desires, have contributed to many failed and challenged software projects. This is especially true for large and complex projects in which requirements knowledge is distributed across thousands of stakeholders. This short paper introduces a new process...
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