Requirements engineering changes for COTS-intensive systems

COTS products (hardware, software, components, subsystems, and so on) are becoming part of the solution for evermore-complex systems. This means you must make changes in any overall system development lifecycle model as well as in the processes and methods you use to define, design, construct, and validate these systems. In particular, requirements engineering and management must undergo process changes.     

Requirements engineering in software product line engineering

Many attempts have been made to increase the productivity and quality of software products based on software reuse. Software product line practice is one such approach, one that focuses on developing a family of products which have a majority of features in common. Hence, there are numerous requirements that are common across the family, but others are unique to individual products. Traditional requirements engineering methods were conceived to deal with single product requirements and are usually not flexible enough to address the needs arising from reusing requirements for a family of products. There is also the additional burden of correctly identifying and engineering both product-line-wide requirements and product-specific requirements as well as evolving them. Therefore, in this special issue, we want to highlight the importance and the role of requirements engineering for product line development as well as to provide insights into the state of the art in the field.     

Requirements engineering for e-business advantage

As a means of contributing to the achievement of business advantage for companies engaging in e-business, we propose a requirements engineering framework that incorporates a business strategy dimension. We employ Jackson’s Problem Frames approach, goal modeling, and business process modeling (BPM) to achieve this. Jackson’s context diagrams, used to represent business model context, are integrated with goal models to describe the requirements of the business strategy. We leverage the paradigm of projection in both approaches as a means of simultaneously decomposing both the requirement and context parts, from an abstract business level to concrete system requirements. Our approach maintains traceability to high-level business objectives via contribution relationship links in the goal model. We integrate use of role activity diagrams to describe business processes in detail where needed. The feasibility of our approach is shown by a well-known case study taken from the literature.     

Requirements engineering and industrial uptake

Although there have been a number of research projects in requirements engineering, industrial uptake from these projects has rarely lived up to expectations. To investigate possible explanations for this and what potential mechanisms there may be for promoting industrial uptake of current and future requirement engineering R&;D projects, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission organised and held a workshop in Brussels. This paper describes the results of this workshop and outlines follow-up support activities.     

Requirements for software-support in concurrent engineering teams

Team work is the customary type of labour organisation used in the framework of Concurrent Engineering (CE). It requires a suitable design of the supporting software. As a first step a model of Concurrent Engineering Team Effectiveness (CETEM) has been developed on the basis of a meta-analysis. Within the scope of an empirical study - which was actually meant to test this new model - guidelines for software-support in Concurrent Engineering Teams were derived. The study was designed as participative observation and continuous process mapping of ten different teams. Sixty-seven measurements were being conducted in team meetings in order to show a correlation between the described variables. Correlation and cluster analyses were utilised. On a super-ordinated management level project contents and objectives as well as their temporal and logical context should be mapped with the help of a workflow-system. On a more operational level in the team itself, degrees of freedom regarding temporal and logical sequence of activities can be accepted. Nevertheless, detailed planning concerning the contents of activities should take place with the assistance of groupware- or database-solutions.     

Requirements for software-support in concurrent engineering teams

Team work is the customary type of labour organisation used in the framework of Concurrent Engineering (CE). It requires a suitable design of the supporting software. As a first step a model of Concurrent Engineering Team Effectiveness (CETEM) has been developed on the basis of a meta-analysis. Within the scope of an empirical study - which was actually meant to test this new model - guidelines for software-support in Concurrent Engineering Teams were derived. The study was designed as participative observation and continuous process mapping of ten different teams. Sixty-seven measurements were being conducted in team meetings in order to show a correlation between the described variables. Correlation and cluster analyses were utilised. On a super-ordinated management level project contents and objectives as well as their temporal and logical context should be mapped with the help of a workflow-system. On a more operational level in the team itself, degrees of freedom regarding temporal and logical sequence of activities can be accepted. Nevertheless, detailed planning concerning the contents of activities should take place with the assistance of groupware- or database-solutions.     

Requirements engineering in small and medium enterprises

Little is known about requirements engineering practices in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). This paper summarises the results of a workshop on requirements engineering held with practitioners from 10 SMEs. The current state-of-the-practice, as reported by the practitioners, differs significantly, and so do their individual problems due to contextual issues (e.g., in-house vs. contract development, type of product). The participants were presented with a set of current requirements engineering principles, techniques, methods, and tools. Important concepts were motivated by small case studies and experiments which we employed as a vehicle for technology transfer. The design of these and their results are described, as well as the practitioner’s rating of the techniques and methods.     

Requirements specification for process-control systems

The paper describes an approach to writing requirements specifications for process-control systems, a specification language that supports this approach, and an example application of the approach and the language on an industrial aircraft collision avoidance system (TCAS II). The example specification demonstrates: the practicality of writing a formal requirements specification for a complex, process-control system; and the feasibility of building a formal model of a system using a specification language that is readable and reviewable by application experts who are not computer scientists or mathematicians. Some lessons learned in the process of this work, which are applicable both to forward and reverse engineering, are also presented     

Unifying software engineering and systems engineering

The author describes CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) and the emerging project methods which demonstrate the opportunities for process improvement gains open to organizations. The organization that changes from separated software and system engineering processes to a more unified approach will find itself far more suited to developing dynamically changing, software-intensive systems. Culture change is never easy, but the alternative is even less palatable     

Balancing software engineering education and industrial needs

In the world of information and communications technologies the demand for professionals with software engineering skills grows at an exponential rate. On this ground, we have conducted a study to help both academia and the software industry form a picture of the relationship between the competences of recent graduates of undergraduate and graduate software engineering programmes and the tasks that these professionals are to perform as part of their jobs in industry. Thanks to this study, academia will be able to observe which skills demanded by industry the software engineering curricula do or do not cater for, and industry will be able to ascertain which tasks a recent software engineering programme graduate is well qualified to perform. The study focuses on the software engineering knowledge guidelines provided in SE2004 and GSwE2009, and the job profiles identified by Career Space.     

Version management needs for structural engineering design

As design objects are created during the design process, it is not sufficient to represent only a single current state of each object. Instead, it will usually be necessary to represent a number of past and current states, existing parallel to each other at various design stages. This requirement has led to the development of various schemes to help manage and control multiple occurrences of a design object.In this paper versions of structural engineering design objects are defined and a scheme for organizing these versions is proposed. A design for a version manager in an object-based design system is then presented. The manager has limited capabilities but can be used as a step toward defining a more complete version management and control system.     

Requirements engineering: the state of the practice

Little contemporary data exists for document actual practices of software professionals for software requirements elicitation, requirements specification, document development, and specification validation. This exploratory survey and its quantitative results offer opportunities for further interpretation and comparison.     

Towards agent systems engineering

The term “ ” has became a buzzword these days, not only in academic circles, but also in some computer magazines and application fields of computer science like manufacturing and logistics. Hence, there is a pressing need for a design methodology for multi-agent systems. Or even stronger, there is a demand for an agent engineering technology, which includes computer assistance during the design phases, for the validation of the designed system, and for the implementation of the multi-agent system as a physically distributed system. This status report will introduce the field of multi-agent systems and its design. Three prominent applications will serve as a first motivation of the theme. Based on the ideas of the agent examples a discussion on the term agent will serve as a first motivation of the theme. Based of the theme. Based on the ideas of the agent architecture of an agent, its communication capabilities, and planning in a multi-agent context. After this broad technical introduction the main topic of this work will be tackled. An introduction to five methodologies for the design of multi-agent systems will be given and a new one, the method, will be presented. Eventually a brief discussion about the multi-agent design approaches will be given, the missing correlations to the task definitions will be critizised, and further research directions will be proposed.