Software system engineering: a tutorial

Applying system engineering principles specifically to the development of large, complex software systems provides a powerful tool for process and product management. The application of system engineering principles to the development of a computer software system produces activities, tasks, and procedures called software system engineering, or SwSE. Many practitioners consider SwSE to be a special case of system engineering, and others consider it to be part of software engineering. However, we can argue that SwSE is a distinct and powerful tool for managing the technical development of large software projects. The article integrates the definitions and processes from the IEEE software engineering standards into the SwSE process     

Artificial intelligence and software engineering: a tutorial introduction to their relationship

This article is a tutorial introduction to artificial intelligence for software engineers, and a similar introduction to software engineering for artificial intelligence workers. Software engineering and artificial intelligence are compared and contrasted in terms of the problems they attempt to solve, the methods they employ, and the tools and techniques that are used. It is argued that a fusion of the two disciplines will be needed for many new software demands. The evidence for this is examined briefly and some of the steps that are needed for an alliance of the two disciplines are mentioned.     

Status report: requirements engineering

It is argued that, in general, requirements engineering produces one large document, written in a natural language, that few people bother to read. Projects that do read and follow the document often build systems that do not satisfy needs. The reasons for the current state of the practice are listed. Research areas that have significant payoff potential, including improving natural-language specifications, rapid prototyping and requirements animation, requirements clustering, requirements-based testing, computer-aided requirements engineering, requirements reuse, research into methods, knowledge engineering, formal methods, and a unified framework, are outlined     

MOQARE: misuse-oriented quality requirements engineering

This work presents MOQARE (misuse-oriented quality requirements engineering), a method to explore quality requirements. The aim of MOQARE is to support intuitive and systematic identification of quality requirements. It was developed by integrating and adapting concepts from other methods (like Misuse Cases). It provides a general conceptual model of quality requirements, and a checklist-based process for deriving them in a top-down fashion. This derivation starts from business goals and vague quality requirements and delivers detailed requirements. MOQARE applies to requirements on the system to be developed requirements, but also derives requirements on the development process, including administration and maintenance. It considers normal and extreme use. The relationships among these requirements are modeled in a Misuse Tree. MOQARE has shown its merits in several case studies, one of which is presented here.     

KMoS-RE: knowledge management on a strategy to requirements engineering

This paper introduces the KMoS-RE Strategy, a novel requirements engineering strategy to Informal Structured Domains. Requirements engineering aims to elicit, analyze, evaluate, consolidate, and manage the requirements of a software system. The complexity of this process depends on the application domain. In Informal Structured Domains, not all concepts and their relations are formally defined, most of the problems do not have algorithms to obtain solutions, and the domain specialists use large amounts of tacit knowledge to solve problems. These characteristics generate ambiguous, inappropriate, and incomplete requirements. It could generate an inadequate software solution, or it could be the cause of increasing the project development time. Therefore, it is important to use an appropriate requirements engineering strategy to minimize these problems. The objective of this study is to present the Knowledge Management on a Strategy to Requirements Engineering (KMoS-RE Strategy): a novel requirements engineering strategy oriented to the transformation and transference of knowledge, and with the aim to minimize the percentage of ambiguous, incomplete, and inappropriate requirements. The functionality and utility of the strategy is explained through its application to a real case study. The case study shows that using the KMoS-RE Strategy helps to internalize the domain knowledge, to clarify the solution idea, to reduce the ignorance of symmetry, to structure the domain knowledge, and to detect and correct wrong beliefs about the domain. All of these are performed in the early stage of the project development.     

Abstraction and context in requirements engineering: Toward a synthesis

Most requirements engineering (RE) research and practice embodies a philosophy that we will call abstractionism, which involves the building of simplified models of domains of discourse and proposed systems. Abstractionists make much use of formal models, such as goal dependency networks. An alternative design philosophy is contextualism, according to which the particularities of the context of use of a system must be understood in detail before the requirements can be derived. Contextualists use qualitative methods to uncover and help interpret these particularities. In this paper, we analyze what it would mean to combine the best features of abstractionism and contextualism, and we ground our discussion in an illustration of abstractionist and contextualist thinking about RE through goal refinement (GR). In the context of the domain of meeting scheduling, we contrast a wholly abstractionist approach to GR with one that incorporates data gathered using two ethnographic methods. In doing so, we consider each step of the abstractionist approach, illustrating where ethnographic data obtained in our work environment affects the model produced. As we proceed, we summarize the general lessons learned. We then discuss how other abstractionist and contextualist methods could be integrated.     

ERP requirements engineering practice: lessons learned

Standard off-the-shelf requirements engineering processes have become a key to conceptualizing any integrated, corporate-wide solution based on packaged enterprise resource planning software. A generic RE model offers defined processes, suggests process stakeholders, specifies steps to accomplish tasks, indicates task dependencies, and provides standard tool support for ERP RE. Essentially, any off-the-shelf RE process is about composition and reconciliation: you start with a general set of business process and data requirements, then explore standard ERP functionality to see how closely it matches your organization's process and data needs.     

On-line monitoring: a tutorial

Online monitoring can complement formal techniques to increase application dependability. The article outlines the concepts and identifies the activities that comprise event based monitoring, describing several representative monitoring systems. It focuses on four areas: dependability, performance enhancement, correctness checking, and security     

Value-based requirements engineering: method and experience

Requirements Engineering - ‘Socio-political’ issues, such as emotions, values and people’s feelings, are often cited as problems in the RE process. A method is described for...     

Geometric substitution: a tutorial

A collection of rewrite rules that transform simple polyhedral models (and polyhedral control meshes) into richer, more visually expressive models is presented. All are based on simple transformations that can be easily implemented and extended. The focus is mostly on techniques of cell replacement, where a unit of the structure (typically a polygon or polyhedron) is replaced by one or more variant units. Such replacements are encoded in rewrite rules. The approach presented helps a modeler who, having created a simple low-detail model, wants to amplify that shape's complexity. Features of the substrate model (such as symmetry relationships and prominent surface features) are generally conserved and often echoed and enhanced in the amplified shape     

Supporting scenario-based requirements engineering

Scenarios have been advocated as a means of improving requirements engineering yet few methods or tools exist to support scenario based RE. The paper reports a method and software assistant tool for scenario based RE that integrates with use case approaches to object oriented development. The method and operation of the tool are illustrated with a financial system case study. Scenarios are used to represent paths of possible behavior through a use case, and these are investigated to elaborate requirements. The method commences by acquisition and modeling of a use case. The use case is then compared with a library of abstract models that represent different application classes. Each model is associated with a set of generic requirements for its class, hence, by identifying the class(es) to which the use case belongs, generic requirements can be reused. Scenario paths are automatically generated from use cases, then exception types are applied to normal event sequences to suggest possible abnormal events resulting from human error. Generic requirements are also attached to exceptions to suggest possible ways of dealing with human error and other types of system failure. Scenarios are validated by rule based frames which detect problematic event patterns. The tool suggests appropriate generic requirements to deal with the problems encountered. The paper concludes with a review of related work and a discussion of the prospects for scenario based RE methods and tools     

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.     

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.     

需求工程的探讨

软件工程被分为需求、设计、实现、测试等几个阶段,其中需求阶段是一个项目的开端,也是项目成功的基石。在软件工程中,需求分析指的是在建立一个新的或改变一个现存的电脑系统时描写新系统的目的、范围、定义和功能时所要做的所有的工作。需求分析是软件工程中的一个关键过程。在这个过程中,系统分析员和软件工程师确定顾客的需要。只有在确定了这些需要后他们才能够分析和寻求新系统的解决方法。在软件工程的历史中,很长时间里人们一直认为需求分析是整个软件工程中最简单的一个步骤,但在过去十年中越来越多的人认识到它是整个过程中最关键的一个过程。假如在需求分析时分析者们未能正确地认识到顾客的需要的话,那么最后的软件实际上不可能达到顾客的需要,或者软件无法在规定的时间里完工。     

Value-based requirements engineering: exploring innovative e-commerce ideas

Innovative e-commerce ideas are characterised by commercial products yet unknown to the market, enabled by information technology such as the Internet and technologies on top of it. How to develop such products is hardly known. We propose an interdisciplinary approach, e ³ -value, to explore an innovative e-commerce idea with the aim of understanding such an idea thoroughly and evaluating it for potential profitability. Our methodology exploits a requirements engineering way of working, but employs concepts and terminology from business science, marketing and axiology. It shows how to model business requirements and improve business–IT alignment, in sophisticated multi-actor value constellations that are common in electronic commerce. In addition to the e ³ -value approach methodology, we also present the action research-based development of our methodology, by using one of the longitudinal projects we carried out in the field of online news article provisioning.     

Multimedia storage servers: a tutorial

Real-time processing of multimedia data is required of those who offer audio and video on-demand. This tutorial highlights the unique issues and data storage characteristics that concern designers