A goal-driven and agent-based requirements engineering framework*

The paper presents a requirements engineering framework (REF), where advanced requirements engineering techniques are combined with software quality modelling approaches to provide an environment within which the stakeholders and the analysts can easily cooperate to discover, organise, reconcile and validate the requirements for a new system. By adopting a basic and essential graphical notation, and a clear top-down methodology, REF allows for an effective involvement of the stakeholders, assisting and driving them to an early definition of the desired system's functionalities and quality attributes, while supporting the redesign of the encompassing organisational context to better exploit the new system's capabilities. As a case study, REF is applied to support the requirements engineering process for a complex software-intensive simulation system. Results demonstrate the feasibility of REF and the benefits it offers to the requirements engineering process, but also to the subsequent system development phases. As illustrated through the case study REF can, in fact, be usefully applied as a forerunner for unified modelling language (UML)-based approaches.*Part of this work was completed while the author was Senior Research Fellow with the Computing Information Systems Engineering Group, at the Royal Military College of Science, Cranfield University (UK)     

Towards automated requirements prioritization and triage

Time-to-market deadlines and budgetary restrictions require stakeholders to carefully prioritize requirements and determine which ones to implement in a given product release. Unfortunately, existing prioritization techniques do not provide sufficient automation for large projects with hundreds of stakeholders and thousands of potentially conflicting requests and requirements. This paper therefore describes a new approach for automating a significant part of the prioritization process. The proposed method utilizes data-mining and machine learning techniques to prioritize requirements according to stakeholders’ interests, business goals, and cross-cutting concerns such as security or performance requirements. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated and evaluated through two case studies based on the requirements of the Ice Breaker System, and also on a set of stakeholders’ raw feature requests mined from the discussion forum of an open source product named SugarCRM.     

需求分析与获取的方法学与技术

本文给出需求工程的一般框架，在对需求分类的基础上主要讨论非功能性（即非行为性）需求，提出对软件需求规范和分析技术的要求，并强调对现有相关工作评价的其中两个方面。     

Automated classification of non-functional requirements

This paper describes a technique for automating the detection and classification of non-functional requirements related to properties such as security, performance, and usability. Early detection of non-functional requirements enables them to be incorporated into the initial architectural design instead of being refactored in at a later date. The approach is used to detect and classify stakeholders’ quality concerns across requirements specifications containing scattered and non-categorized requirements, and also across freeform documents such as meeting minutes, interview notes, and memos. This paper first describes the classification algorithm and then evaluates its effectiveness through reporting a series of experiments based on 30 requirements specifications developed as term projects by MS students at DePaul University. A new and iterative approach is then introduced for training or retraining a classifier to detect and classify non-functional requirements (NFR) in datasets dissimilar to the initial training sets. This approach is evaluated against a large free-form requirements document obtained from Siemens Logistics and Automotive Organization. Although to the NFR classifier is unable to detect all of the NFRs, it is useful for supporting an analyst in the error-prone task of manually discovering NFRs, and furthermore can be used to quickly analyse large and complex documents in order to search for NFRs.     

Scenario advisor tool for requirements engineering

This study investigates the usefulness of a scenario advisor tool which was built to help requirements engineers to generate sufficient sets of scenarios in the domain of socio-technical systems. The tool provides traceability between scenario models and requirements and helps to generate new scenarios and scenario variations. Through two series of evaluation sessions, we found that the scenario advisor tool helped users to write more sound scenarios without any domain knowledge, and to generate more variations on existing scenarios by providing specific scenario-generation hints for each scenario component. The tool should improve the reliability of requirements elicitation and validation.     

Agile requirements engineering via paraconsistent reasoning

Innovative companies need an agile approach towards product and service requirements, to rapidly respond to and exploit changing conditions. The agile approach to requirements must nonetheless be systematic, especially with respect to accommodating legal and non-functional requirements. This paper examines how to support lightweight, agile requirements processes which can still be systematically modeled, analyzed and changed. We propose a framework, RE-KOMBINE, which is based on a propositional language for requirements modeling called Techne. We define operations on Techne models which tolerate the presence of inconsistencies. This paraconsistent reasoning is vital for supporting delayed commitment to particular design solutions. We evaluate these operations with an industry case study using two well-known formal analysis tools. Our evaluations show that the proposed framework scales to industry-sized requirements model, while still retaining (via propositional logic) the informality that is so useful during early requirements analysis.     

Improving the detection of requirements discordances among stakeholders

This paper introduces a technique to identify requirements discordances among stakeholders. This technique is validated in experiments. An extended version of the goal-oriented requirements elicitation method, named attributed goal-oriented analysis (AGORA), and its supporting tool are used. Two types of requirements discordances among stakeholders are defined: the first arises from the different interpretations by the stakeholders and the second is the result of different evaluations of preferences. Discordances are detected by the preference matrices in AGORA. Each preference matrix represents both preferences of each stakeholder and the estimated preferences of other stakeholders. A supporting tool for the AGORA method was developed. This tool is a groupware that seamlessly combines face-to-face meetings for goal elicitation and distributed individual sessions for scoring preference values. The experimental results showed that the proposed classification of discordances was sound and that the occurrences of the requirements discordances could be detected by preference matrices.     

Promoting software quality through a human,social and organisational requirements elicitation process

Human, social and organisational (HSO) factors play a decisive role in software development in terms of determining functional and non-functional characteristics of software products. The significance of these factors is underlined by the need to produce applications that fit nicely in a working setting, supporting the working procedures followed and promoting users' content and productivity. In this context, a new requirements elicitation process is proposed, a part of which utilises a short-scale ethnography analysis. The process introduces specific steps for recording HSO factors based on certain software quality characteristics that are treated as principal components for conducting requirements identification. The output of the process is the HSO document, which can be used in conjunction with the classic requirements document to identify structural and functional aspects of the system.