Cultural influence on requirements engineering activities: a systematic literature review and analysis

Requirements Engineering - Requirements engineering (RE) involves the critical activities required to capture customers’ requirements/needs accurately. RE is a communication-intensive...     

Software requirements testing approaches: a systematic literature review

Requirements Engineering - Testing a software system is an important step approach to ensuring quality, safety, and reliability in safety-critical systems (SCS). Several authors have published new...     

On the generation of requirements specifications from software engineering models: A systematic literature review

System and software requirements documents play a crucial role in software engineering in that they must both communicate requirements to clients in an understandable manner and define requirements in precise detail for system developers. The benefits of both lists of textual requirements (usually written in natural language) and software engineering models (usually specified in graphical form) can be brought together by combining the two approaches in the specification of system and software requirements documents. If, moreover, textual requirements are generated from models in an automatic or closely monitored form, the effort of specifying those requirements is reduced and the completeness of the specification and the management of the requirements traceability are improved. This paper presents a systematic review of the literature related to the generation of textual requirements specifications from software engineering models.     

Bayesian networks for enhancement of requirements engineering: a literature review

Requirements analysis is the software engineering stage that is closest to the users’ world. It also involves tasks that are knowledge intensive. Thus, the use of Bayesian networks (BNs) to model this knowledge would be a valuable aid. These probabilistic models could manage the imprecision and ambiguities usually present in requirements engineering (RE). In this work, we conduct a literature review focusing on where and how BNs are applied on subareas of RE in order to identify which gaps remain uncovered and which methods might engineers employ to incorporate this intelligent technique into their own requirements processes. The scarcity of identified studies (there are only 20) suggests that not all RE areas have been properly investigated in the literature. The evidence available for adopting BNs into RE is sufficiently mature yet the methods applied are not easily translatable to other topics. Nonetheless, there are enough studies supporting the applicability of synergistic cooperation between RE and BNs. This work provides a background for understanding the current state of research encompassing RE and BNs. Functional, non-functional and -ilities requirements artifacts are enhanced by the use of BNs. These models were obtained by interacting with experts or by learning from databases. The most common criticism from the point of view of BN experts is that the models lack validation, whereas requirements engineers point to the lack of a clear application method for BNs and the lack of tools for incorporating them as built-in help functions.     

Exploring service-oriented system engineering challenges: a systematic literature review

Service-oriented system engineering (SOSE) has drawn increasing attention since service-oriented computing was introduced in the beginning of this decade. A large number of SOSE challenges that call for special software engineering efforts have been proposed in the research community. Our goal is to gain insight into the current status of SOSE research issues as published to date. To this end, we conducted a systematic literature review exploring SOSE challenges that have been claimed between January 2000 and July 2008. This paper presents the results of the systematic review as well as the empirical research method we followed. In this review, of the 729 publications that have been examined, 51 were selected as primary studies, from which more than 400 SOSE challenges were elicited. By applying qualitative data analysis methods to the extracted data from the review, we proved our hypotheses about the classification scheme. We are able to conclude that the SOSE challenges can be classified along two dimensions: (a) based on themes (or topics) that they cover and (b) based on characteristics (or types) that they reveal. By analyzing the distribution of the SOSE challenges on the topics and types in the years 2000–2008, we are able to point out the trend in SOSE research activities. The findings of this review further provide empirical evidence for establishing future SOSE research agendas.     

Applications of artificial intelligence in engineering and manufacturing: a systematic review

Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing - Engineering and manufacturing processes and systems designs involve many challenges, such as dynamism, chaotic behaviours, and complexity. Of late, the...     

Technology transfer decision support in requirements engineering research: a systematic review of REj

One of the main goals of an applied research field such as requirements engineering is the transfer of research results to industrial use. To promote industrial adoption of technologies developed in academia, researchers need to provide tangible evidence of the advantages of using them. This can be done through industry validation, enabling researchers to test and validate technologies in a real setting with real users and applications. The evidence obtained, together with detailed information on how the validation was conducted, offers rich decision support material for industrial practitioners seeking to adopt new technologies. This paper presents a comprehensive systematic literature review of all papers published in the Requirements Engineering journal containing any type of technology evaluation. The aim is to gauge the support for technology transfer, i.e., to what degree industrial practitioners can use the reporting of technology evaluations in the journal as decision support for adopting the technologies in industrial practice. Findings show that very few evaluations offer full technology transfer support, i.e., have a realistic scale, application or subjects. The major improvement potential concerning support for technology transfer is found to be the subjects used in the evaluations. Attaining company support, including support for using practitioners as subjects, is vital for technology transfer and for researchers seeking to validate technologies.

A systematic literature review of stakeholder identification methods in requirements elicitation

This paper presents a systematic review of relevant published studies related to topics in Requirements Engineering, specifically, concerning stakeholder identification methods in requirements elicitation, dated from 1984 to 2011. Addressing four specific research questions, this systematic literature review shows the following evidence gathered from these studies: current status of stakeholder identification in software requirement elicitation, the best practices recommended for its performance, consequences of incorrect identification in requirements quality, and, aspects which need to be improved. Our findings suggest that the analyzed approaches still have serious limitations in terms of covering all aspects of stakeholder identification as an important part of requirements elicitation. However, through correctly identifying and understanding the stakeholders, it is possible to develop high quality software.     

Requirements engineering for software product lines: A systematic literature review

ContextSoftware product line engineering (SPLE) is a growing area showing promising results in research and practice. In order to foster its further development and acceptance in industry, it is necessary to assess the quality of the research so that proper evidence for adoption and validity are ensured. This holds in particular for requirements engineering (RE) within SPLE, where a growing number of approaches have been proposed.ObjectiveThis paper focuses on RE within SPLE and has the following goals: assess research quality, synthesize evidence to suggest important implications for practice, and identify research trends, open problems, and areas for improvement.MethodA systematic literature review was conducted with three research questions and assessed 49 studies, dated from 1990 to 2009.ResultsThe evidence for adoption of the methods is not mature, given the primary focus on toy examples. The proposed approaches still have serious limitations in terms of rigor, credibility, and validity of their findings. Additionally, most approaches still lack tool support addressing the heterogeneity and mostly textual nature of requirements formats as well as address only the proactive SPLE adoption strategy.ConclusionsFurther empirical studies should be performed with sufficient rigor to enhance the body of evidence in RE within SPLE. In this context, there is a clear need for conducting studies comparing alternative methods. In order to address scalability and popularization of the approaches, future research should be invested in tool support and in addressing combined SPLE adoption strategies.     

Reusable knowledge in security requirements engineering: a systematic mapping study

Security is a concern that must be taken into consideration starting from the early stages of system development. Over the last two decades, researchers and engineers have developed a considerable number of methods for security requirements engineering. Some of them rely on the (re)use of security knowledge. Despite some existing surveys about security requirements engineering, there is not yet any reference for researchers and practitioners that presents in a systematic way the existing proposals, techniques, and tools related to security knowledge reuse in security requirements engineering. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap by looking into drawing a picture of the literature on knowledge and reuse in security requirements engineering. The questions we address are related to methods, techniques, modeling frameworks, and tools for and by reuse in security requirements engineering. We address these questions through a systematic mapping study. The mapping study was a literature review conducted with the goal of identifying, analyzing, and categorizing state-of-the-art research on our topic. This mapping study analyzes more than thirty approaches, covering 20 years of research in security requirements engineering. The contributions can be summarized as follows: (1) A framework was defined for analyzing and comparing the different proposals as well as categorizing future contributions related to knowledge reuse and security requirements engineering; (2) the different forms of knowledge representation and reuse were identified; and (3) previous surveys were updated. We conclude that most methods should introduce more reusable knowledge to manage security requirements.     

Comparing ontologies and databases: a critical review of lifecycle engineering models in manufacturing

Knowledge and Information Systems - The literature on the modeling and management of data generated through the lifecycle of a manufacturing system is split into two main paradigms: product...     

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.     

Automatic software refactoring: a systematic literature review

Refactoring a software artifact is an embedded task in the maintenance phase of the software life cycle. To reduce the time and effort required for this task, researchers proposed methods to automate the software refactoring process at the design and code levels. In this paper, we conducted a systematic literature review of papers that suggest, propose, or implement an automated refactoring process. Using different phases, setting several quality measures, and snowballing, only 41 papers passed to the last stage to be analyzed and reviewed. We observe an increase in the number of papers that propose automatic refactoring. The results show that while most of the papers discuss code refactoring, only a few recent papers are focused on model refactoring. Search-based refactoring is gaining more popularity, and several researchers have used it to perform refactoring in a quick and efficient manner.     

Analysis of variability models: a systematic literature review

Software and Systems Modeling - Dealing with variability, during Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE), means trying to allow software engineers to develop a set of similar applications based on...     

Performance prediction of parallel applications: a systematic literature review

The Journal of Supercomputing - Different techniques for estimating the execution time of parallel applications have been studied for the last 25 years. These approaches have proposed different...     

Hierarchical classification of data streams: a systematic literature review

The classification task usually works with flat and batch learners, assuming problems as stationary and without relations between class labels. Nevertheless, several real-world problems do not assume these premises, i.e., data have labels organized hierarchically and are made available in streaming fashion, meaning that their behavior can drift over time. Existing studies on hierarchical classification do not consider data streams as input of their process, and thus, data is assumed as stationary and handled through batch learners. The same can be said about works on streaming data, as the hierarchical classification is overlooked. Studies concerning each area individually are promising, yet, do not tackle their intersection. This study analyzes the main characteristics of the state-of-the-art works on hierarchical classification for streaming data concerning five aspects: (i) problems tackled, (ii) datasets, (iii) algorithms, (iv) evaluation metrics, and (v) research gaps in the area. We performed a systematic literature review of primary studies and retrieved 3,722 papers, of which 42 were identified as relevant and used to answer the aforementioned research questions. We found that the problems handled by hierarchical classification of data streams include mainly classification of images, human activities, texts, and audio; the datasets are mostly created or synthetic data; the algorithms and evaluation metrics are well-known techniques or based on those; and research gaps are related to dynamic context, data complexity, and computational resources constraints. We also provide implications for future research and experiments to consider common characteristics shared amongst hierarchical classification and data stream classification.

     

Risk factors in software development projects: a systematic literature review

Software Quality Journal - Risks are an inherent part of any software project. The presence of risks in environments of software development projects requires the perception so that the associated...     

An automated essay scoring systems: a systematic literature review

Assessment in the Education system plays a significant role in judging student performance. The present evaluation system is through human assessment. As the number of teachers' student ratio is gradually increasing, the manual evaluation process becomes complicated. The drawback of manual evaluation is that it is time-consuming, lacks reliability, and many more. This connection online examination system evolved as an alternative tool for pen and paper-based methods. Present Computer-based evaluation system works only for multiple-choice questions, but there is no proper evaluation system for grading essays and short answers. Many researchers are working on automated essay grading and short answer scoring for the last few decades, but assessing an essay by considering all parameters like the relevance of the content to the prompt, development of ideas, Cohesion, and Coherence is a big challenge till now. Few researchers focused on Content-based evaluation, while many of them addressed style-based assessment. This paper provides a systematic literature review on automated essay scoring systems. We studied the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques used to evaluate automatic essay scoring and analyzed the limitations of the current studies and research trends. We observed that the essay evaluation is not done based on the relevance of the content and coherence.