REUBI: A Requirements Engineering method for ubiquitous systems

Recent technological advances are increasing the spread of Ubiquitous Computing, leading to the appearance of numerous software systems, which benefit from the features of this new paradigm. Nevertheless, there are a lack of methodologies to properly support the development process of these systems. An important part of the Software Engineering lifecycle is the Requirements Engineering stage, as it grounds the bases for system design for their success. In particular, systematically addressing Non-Functional Requirements such as dynamicity and adaptation, that are important features of ubiquitous systems, eventually leads to higher quality designs. In this paper, a Requirements Engineering Method for the analysis of Ubiquitous Systems, called REUBI, is introduced. It is a goal-based method that represents the influence of context and adverse situations, providing an evaluation procedure to help in the decision making about objectives satisfaction. The proposal is illustrated through the analysis of a Positioning Service of a real system. Additionally, the application of the method has been evaluated by a team of software engineers for the analysis of an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) health care system.     

Specifying requirements for collection and analysis of online user feedback

Requirements Engineering - According to data-driven Requirements Engineering (RE), explicit and implicit user feedback can be considered a relevant source of requirements, thus supporting...     

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...     

Catalog of invisibility correlations for UbiComp and IoT applications

Requirements Engineering - The advance of Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) and Internet of Things (IoT) brought a new set of Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs), especially related to Human-Computer...     

Survey and analysis on Security Requirements Engineering

Security Requirements Engineering is a new research area in software engineering, with the realization that security must be analyzed early during the requirements phase. Many researchers are working in this area; however, there is a lack in security requirements treatment. The security requirements are one of the non-functional requirements, which act as constraints on functions of the system. Organizations are depending on information systems for communicating and sharing information. Thus, IT security is becoming central in fulfilling business goals, to guard assets and to create trustworthy systems. To develop systems with adequate security features, it is essential to capture the security requirements. In this paper, we present a view on Security Requirements, issues, types, Security Requirements Engineering (SRE) and methods. We analyzed and compared different methods and found that SQUARE and Security Requirements Engineering Process methods cover most of the important activities of SRE. The developers can adopt these SRE methods and easily identify the security requirements for software systems.     

敏捷需求建模的研究与设计

文章综合研究了敏捷方法与极限编程开发过程,结合需求工程方法,设计提出了基于敏捷思想的敏捷需求建模（Agile Requiremenb Modeling。简称ARM）。敏捷需求建模作为各种敏捷方法在软件需求中的实践补充,能够满足CMMI的目标。可以为中小型软件开发组织的行动指南提供参考。     

The state-of-practice in requirements elicitation: an extended interview study at 12 companies

Requirements Engineering - Requirements engineering remains a discipline that is faced with a large number of challenges, including the implementation of a requirements elicitation process in...     

Assisted requirements selection by clustering

Requirements Engineering - Requirements selection is a decision-making process that enables project managers to focus on the deliverables that add most value to the project outcome. This task is...     

Detecting coreferent entities in natural language requirements

Requirements Engineering - Requirements are usually written in natural language and evolve continuously during the process of software development, which involves a large number of...     

Reducing ambiguity during enterprise design

Requirements Engineering - Requirements elicitation is one of the most important phases in the design process and applied by many engineering disciplines. A more recent application of the design...     

面向行为的需求建模研究及实现

需求建模是需求工程中的重要步骤。提出了一种面向行为的需求建模方法,首先将目标系统问题域划分成多个子问题域,然后在子问题域里建立多个视点,在每个视点内,根据需求建立多个场景。对于每个场景,用行为描述语言建立场景行为模型,视点内所有场景的行为模型组合构成视点行为模型,目标系统所有视点的行为模型组合构成系统行为模型。在行为模型的基础上,提出了一系列特性以及其验证方法,用于验证行为模型的正确性以及系统特性。基于以上方法,设计和实现了面向行为的需求建模工具BRMT),以辅助开发人员从行为的角度进行需求建模。     

A novel hybrid requirement’s prioritization approach based on critical software project factors

Cognition, Technology & Work - Requirements prioritization is essential for development of quality software products. Requirements prioritization helps focus on the most important requirements...     

Correction to: On the relationship between similar requirements and similar software

Requirements Engineering -     

Challenging universal truths of requirements engineering

Requirements engineering is likely to be a major issue in this decade. The author examines two widely held beliefs: requirements describe a system's “what”, not its “how”. Requirements must be represented as abstractions     

Configuration for mass customization: how to extend product configuration towards requirements and process configuration

In order to develop mass customization, many companies use configuration software to customize their products. Although many studies already exist about Product Configuration, Requirements and Process Configuration have not been studied in detail. As all these three aspects must be considered for mass customization, the aim of this paper is to show how Product Configuration, when considered as a constraint satisfaction problem, can be extended upstream towards Requirements Configuration and downstream towards Process Configuration. Product Configuration basics are first reviewed thanks to a constraint based approach, and an analysis of industrial configuration situations is done in order to clarify mass customization needs in terms of configuration. Then upstream Requirements Configuration and downstream Process Configuration are defined and generic models are proposed. It is shown that the proposed elements allow a global and consistent flow of configuration activities. A detailed example illustrates the different configuration problems and a discussion terminates the paper.     

Requirements Validation: Execution of UML Models with CPN Tools

Requirements validation is a critical task in any engineering project. The confrontation of stakeholders with static requirements models is not enough, since stakeholders with non-computer science education are not able to discover all the inter-dependencies between the elicited requirements. Even with simple unified modelling language (UML) requirements models, it is not easy for the development team to get confidence on the stakeholders’ requirements validation. This paper describes an approach, based on the construction of executable interactive prototypes, to support the validation of workflow requirements, where the system to be built must explicitly support the interaction between people within a pervasive cooperative workflow execution. A case study from a real project is used to illustrate the proposed approach. This work has been supported by projects uPAIN (AdI/IDEIA/70/2004/3.1B/00364/007) and STACOS (FCT/POSI/CHS/48875/2002).     

Towards the prioritization of system test cases

During software development, companies are frequently faced with lack of time and resources, which limits their ability to effectively complete testing efforts. This paper presents a system‐level, value‐driven approach to test case prioritization called the Prioritization of Requirements for Test (PORT). PORT involves analysing and assigning value to each requirement using the following four factors: requirements volatility, customer priority, implementation complexity, and fault proneness. System test cases are prioritized such that the test cases for requirements with higher priority are executed earlier during system test. PORT was applied to four student team projects as well as an industrial case study. The results show that PORT improves the rate of detection of severe failures over random prioritization. Additionally, the results indicate that customer priority was the most important contributor towards improved rate of failure detection. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Aligning requirements and testing through metamodeling and patterns: design and evaluation

Requirements Engineering - Poorly executed requirements engineering activities profoundly affect the deliverables’ quality and project’s budget and schedule. High-quality requirements...     

Identifying requirements conflicts and cooperation: how quality attributes and automated traceability can help

Requirements about software attributes have numerous complex and nontrivial interdependencies. Requirements conflict with each other when they make contradicting statements about common software attributes, and they cooperate when they mutually enforce such attributes. Because software developers rarely apply formal requirements specification techniques in practice, and because reliable techniques for natural language understanding aren't available, it's generally infeasible to automatically identify conflicts and cooperation among requirements. In software development and maintenance, identifying conflicts and cooperation among requirements is challenging. Fortunately, quality attributes can help. In addition, automated traceability techniques can eliminate falsely identified conflicts and cooperation efficiently.     

Correction to: Modular norm models: practical representation and analysis of contractual rights and obligations

Requirements Engineering - The article “Modular norm models: practical representation and analysis of contractual rights and obligations.