Why and how of requirements tracing

While requirements traceability is explicitly required in US Department of Defense software contracts, it is often hard to sell in other situations. This article explains how Abbott Laboratories Diagnostics Division approaches traceability. To illustrate our program, we describe how we applied it to an R&D project to develop an embedded, real-time in vitro diagnostic instrument. The software is part of a system to test human body fluids for conditions such as cancer or hepatitis. We learned a great deal from this application and continue to experiment with and evolve the traceability-analysis process. In particular, we found that we must establish documentation rules and formats much earlier in the life cycle. Another lesson we learned is that traceability does cost. You need staff to support formal inspections or reviews. For most projects, you need some type of tool to assist in managing the trace matrices. We developed a relatively low-cost tool to handle our needs. Whatever the cost, it is important to include it as well as the costs for developing and maintaining procedures for documentation formats and generation, traceability analysis, and formal inspections. Our biggest lesson is that traceability is critical to project success. We believe it was one of the key factors in releasing our diagnostic instrument on time. Finally, we determined the conditions under which some type of traceability program is necessary     

Naive semantics to support automated database design

Research devoted to developing knowledge-based tools for database design has demonstrated that it is possible to encode a great deal of process knowledge about database design in a (knowledge-based) computer program. However, experience with these tools shows that the contribution of an expert human designer extends beyond his or her knowledge of database design techniques. The paper discusses the application of an approach, called Naive Semantics (NS), to simulate the contributions made to a design based on the designer's general knowledge. Naive semantics involves the use of an extensible store of generally understood knowledge about the world. The paper describes the types of information that could be included in a Naive Semantics knowledge base and how that knowledge might be applied to increase the effectiveness of automated database design systems. Results of various implementations of ontologies based on Naive Semantics are discussed     

An object-oriented tool for tracing requirements

Large scale development demands tracing requirements and other objects in the face of continuous evolution. Requirements change in nature, scope, content, and form to become more consistent, accurate, complete, and clear. We present a tracing tool that supports evolution and that treats requirements and relations among them as objects     

Application of swarm techniques to requirements tracing

We posit that swarm intelligence can be applied to effectively address requirements engineering problems. Specifically, this paper demonstrates the applicability of swarm intelligence to the requirements tracing problem using two techniques: a simple swarm algorithm and a pheromone swarm algorithm. The techniques have been validated using two real-world datasets from two problem domains. The simple swarm technique generated requirements traceability matrices between textual requirements artifacts (high-level requirements traced to low-level requirements, for example). When compared with a baseline information retrieval tracing method, the swarm algorithms showed mixed results. The swarms achieved statistically significantly results on one of the secondary measurements for one dataset compared with the baseline method, lending support for continued investigation into swarms for tracing.     

The state of the art in automated requirements elicitation

ContextIn large software development projects a huge number of unstructured text documents from various stakeholders becomes available and needs to be analyzed and transformed into structured requirements. This elicitation process is known to be time-consuming and error-prone when performed manually by a requirements engineer. Consequently, substantial research has been done to automate the process through a plethora of tools and technologies.ObjectiveThis paper aims to capture the current state of automated requirements elicitation and derive future research directions by identifying gaps in the existing body of knowledge and through relating existing works to each other. More specifically, we are investigating the following research question: What is the state of the art in research covering tool support for automated requirements elicitation from natural language documents?MethodA systematic review of the literature in automated requirements elicitation is performed. Identified works are categorized using an analysis framework comprising tool categories, technological concepts and evaluation approaches. Furthermore, the identified papers are related to each other through citation analysis to trace the development of the research field.ResultsWe identified, categorized and related 36 relevant publications. Summarizing the observations we made, we propose future research to (1) investigate alternative elicitation paradigms going beyond a pure automation approach (2) compare the effects of different types of knowledge on elicitation results (3) apply comparative evaluation methods and multi-dimensional evaluation measures and (4) strive for a closer integration of research activities across the sub-fields of automatic requirements elicitation.ConclusionThrough the results of our paper, we intend to contribute to the Requirements Engineering body of knowledge by (1) conceptualizing an analysis framework for works in the area of automated requirements elicitation, going beyond former classifications (2) providing an extensive overview and categorization of existing works in this area (3) formulating concise directions for future research.     

On the role of automated theorem proving in the compile-time derivation of concurrency

A recent trend in program development is to derive correct implementations from program specifications by the application of a formal calculus, a programming methodology. The application of formal rules lends itself to automation. We investigate the automation of one part of a methodology for programming with concurrency. In this methodology, concurrency is derived by transforming the sequential execution of a program into an equivalent concurrent execution on the basis of formal transformation rules. Such rules can be interpreted as theorems of semantic equivalences. The mechanical certification of these theorems would significantly enhance the reliability of the methodology. The following is an initial exploration of this problem applied to a certain class of programs: sorting networks. We present an implementation of a part of the underlying semantic theory in Boyer and Moore's mechanized logic, and report on the mechanical proof of a transformation that derives concurrency for an insertion sort.     

On the semantics of parsing actions

Parsers, whether constructed by hand or automatically via a parser generator tool, typically need to compute some useful semantic information in addition to the purely syntactic analysis of their input. Semantic actions may be added to parsing code by hand, or the parser generator may have its own syntax for annotating grammar rules with semantic actions. In this paper, we take a functional programming view of such actions. We use concepts from the semantics of mostly functional programming languages and adapt them to give meaning to the actions of the parser. Specifically, the semantics is inspired by the categorical semantics of lambda calculi and the use of premonoidal categories for the semantics of effects in programming languages. This framework is then applied to our leading example, the transformation of grammars to eliminate left recursion. The syntactic transformation of left-recursion elimination leads to a corresponding semantic transformation of the actions for the grammar. We prove the semantic transformation correct and relate it to continuation passing style, a widely studied transformation in lambda calculi and functional programming. As an idealization of the input language of parser generators, we define a call-by-value calculus with first-order functions and a type-and-effect system where the effects are given by sequences of grammar symbols. The account of left-recursion elimination is then extended to this calculus.     

On the semantics of noun compounds

This paper provides new insights on the semantic characteristics of two and three noun compounds. An analysis is performed using two sets of semantic classification categories: a list of 8 prepositional paraphrases previously proposed by Lauer [Designing statistical language learners: experiments on noun compounds, Ph.D. Thesis, Macquarie University, Australia] and a new set of 35 semantic relations introduced by us. We show the distribution of these semantic categories on a corpus of noun compounds and present several models for the bracketing and the semantic classification of noun compounds. The results are compared against state-of-the-art models reported in the literature.     

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.     

Interoperability requirements for automated manufacturing systems in construction

Multi-disciplinary software interoperability in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Operations industry is becoming a new and widely adopted business culture. Technical advances in interoperability architectures, frameworks, methods and standards during the last decade resulted in higher maturity of product and process models. Mature models, in effect, enable data exchange by an increasing number of software applications in the industry. This establishes trust in data exchange and results in the lower cost impact of inefficient interoperability. The negative cost impact increases with advancing life-cycle phase, from planning and design phase to construction phase and to operation and maintenance phase. Interoperability in the planning and design phase is most mature and well published, while interoperability in the construction phase and for automated manufacturing is less researched. This paper reviews state-of-the art automated manufacturing systems in construction and researches interoperability requirements for automated construction in context of the entire building lifecycle. Our research is based on experimental free-form clay building, designed with embedded simple HVAC components, and manufactured with additive layer technology. Conclusions provide valuable results for interoperability research and practice in construction projects with automated manufacturing systems in place.     

On process rate semantics

We provide translations between process algebra and systems of chemical reactions. We show that the translations preserve discrete-state (stochastic) and continuous-state (concentration) semantics, and in particular that the continuous-state semantics of processes corresponds to the differential equations of chemistry based on the law of mass action. The novel semantics of processes so obtained equates processes that have the same state occupation dynamics, but which may have different interaction interfaces.     

On the semantics of object-oriented landmark recognition

Computer vision is an ever more important means for the navigation of UAVs. Here we propose a landmark recognition system looking for salient man-made infrastructure. An object-oriented structural system is preferred since it can utilize known properties of these objects such as part-of hierarchies, mutual geometric constraints of parts, generalization etc. The structure, available for use as landmark, will vary strongly with the region the UAV is supposed to navigate in. The structural knowledge can lose its meaning in two ways: 1) If the area contains a lot of non-intended structure fulfilling the demands modeled the system will start hallucinating lots of landmarks anywhere. 2) If the landmarks in the area do not fulfill the demands modeled they will not be detected. Up to a certain degree these semantics—or lack of meaning—can be investigated mathematically using probabilistic models. But the results from this are very optimistic. In reality the meaning breaks down much earlier. This contribution reports on an example: Testing a system, designed for a central European country (Germany), for use elsewhere (e.g., Russia or Turkey).     

On the formal semantics of IF-like logics

In classical logics, the meaning of a formula is invariant with respect to the renaming of bound variables. This property, normally taken for granted, has been shown not to hold in the case of Independence Friendly (IF) logics. In this paper we argue that this is not an inherent characteristic of these logics but a defect in the way in which the compositional semantics given by Hodges for the regular fragment was generalized to arbitrary formulas. We fix this by proposing an alternative formalization, based on a variation of the classical notion of valuation. Basic metatheoretical results are proven. We present these results for Hodges' slash logic (from which these can be easily transferred to other IF-like logics) and we also consider the flattening operator, for which we give novel game-theoretical semantics.     

On the Codd semantics of SQL nulls

Theoretical models used in database research often have subtle differences with those occurring in practice. One particular mismatch that is usually neglected concerns the use of marked nulls to represent missing values in theoretical models of incompleteness, while in an SQL database these are all denoted by the same syntactic

object. It is commonly argued that results obtained in the model with marked nulls carry over to SQL, because SQL nulls can be interpreted as Codd nulls, which are simply marked nulls that do not repeat. This argument, however, does not take into account that even simple queries may produce answers where distinct occurrences of

do in fact denote the same unknown value. For such queries, interpreting SQL nulls as Codd nulls would incorrectly change the semantics of query answers. To use results about Codd nulls for real-life SQL queries, we need to understand which queries preserve the Codd interpretation of SQL nulls. We show, however, that the class of relational algebra queries preserving Codd interpretation is not recursively enumerable, which necessitates looking for sufficient conditions for such preservation. Those can be obtained by exploiting the information provided by NOT NULL constraints on the database schema. We devise mild syntactic restrictions on queries that guarantee preservation, do not limit the full expressiveness of queries on databases without nulls, and can be checked efficiently.     

Detecting,classifying, and tracing non-functional software requirements

In this paper, we describe a novel unsupervised approach for detecting, classifying, and tracing non-functional software requirements (NFRs). The proposed approach exploits the textual semantics of software functional requirements (FRs) to infer potential quality constraints enforced in the system. In particular, we conduct a systematic analysis of a series of word similarity methods and clustering techniques to generate semantically cohesive clusters of FR words. These clusters are classified into various categories of NFRs based on their semantic similarity to basic NFR labels. Discovered NFRs are then traced to their implementation in the solution space based on their textual semantic similarity to source code artifacts. Three software systems are used to conduct the experimental analysis in this paper. The results show that methods that exploit massive sources of textual human knowledge are more accurate in capturing and modeling the notion of similarity between FR words in a software system. Results also show that hierarchical clustering algorithms are more capable of generating thematic word clusters than partitioning clustering techniques. In terms of performance, our analysis indicates that the proposed approach can discover, classify, and trace NFRs with accuracy levels that can be adequate for practical applications.     

Arts—an automated requirements traceability system

Management of the hundreds or thousands of requirements associated with a large aerospace system is a tedious, error-prone process. Automated Requirements Traceability System (ARTS) has been developed to automate this process. ARTS is a bookkeeping program that operates on a data base consisting of system requirements and their attributes. It provides upward and downward traceability in a hierarchical structure, as well as data base management and output operations on any requirement-related attributes selected by the user. ARTS is currently implemented on the UNIVAC 1110, DEC VAX-11/780, and IBM computers.     

On the semantics of qualitative attributes in knowledge elicitation

In this work we propose a new discretization method for quantitative domains. We give an overview of the methods in the literature and we introduce a new one that returns better results. As the need for a discretization method appeared in the definition of a procedure for evaluating the semantics of linguistic labels defined in a previous paper, we also give in this paper an overview of this semantics and of its analysis. ©1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Advancing candidate link generation for requirements tracing: the study of methods

This paper addresses the issues related to improving the overall quality of the dynamic candidate link generation for the requirements tracing process for verification and validation and independent verification and validation analysts. The contribution of the paper is four-fold: we define goals for a tracing tool based on analyst responsibilities in the tracing process, we introduce several new measures for validating that the goals have been satisfied, we implement analyst feedback in the tracing process, and we present a prototype tool that we built, RETRO (REquirements TRacing On-target), to address these goals. We also present the results of a study used to assess RETRO's support of goals and goal elements that can be measured objectively.