Elicitation Of Functional Requirements Research Articles

Elicitation of functional requirements from the application programming interface documentation for functional testing

We address a common problem in this paper. The only available documentation for a computer program consists of a user API documentation while we need to identify functional requirements and build test suite to test them. We describe a technique for functional requirements elicitation from the user API documentation. Requirements management tool Requality is exploited in this technique. The tool has been used in several industrial software verification projects.

Rapid Requirements Elicitation of Enterprise Applications Based on Executable Mockups

Software development begins with the requirements. Misunderstandings with customers in this early phase of development result in wasted development time. This work investigates the possibility of using executable UI mockups in the initial phases of functional requirements elicitation during the development of business applications. Although there has been a lot of research in the field in recent years, we find that there is still a need to improve model-driven tool design in order to enable customer participation from the initial phases of requirement specifications based on working prototypes. These prototypes can directly be reused in the rest of the development process. To meet the goal, we have been developing an open-source solution called Kroki that enables rapid collaborative development. We conducted a series of 10 joint user sessions with domain experts from different domains and backgrounds, resulting in the prototype specifications ranging from 7 to 20 screen mockups accompanied with domain models, developed in two-hour time frames. In this paper, we present our tool design that contributes to rapid joint development, and the results from the user sessions.

Modeling Security and Privacy Requirements: a Use Case-Driven Approach

Context: Modern internet-based services, ranging from food-delivery to home-caring, leverage the availability of multiple programmable devices to provide handy services tailored to end-user needs. These services are delivered through an ecosystem of device-specific software components and interfaces (e.g., mobile and wearable device applications). Since they often handle private information (e.g., location and health status), their security and privacy requirements are of crucial importance. Defining and analyzing those requirements is a significant challenge due to the multiple types of software components and devices integrated into software ecosystems. Each software component presents peculiarities that often depend on the context and the devices the component interact with, and that must be considered when dealing with security and privacy requirements. Objective: In this paper, we propose, apply, and assess a modeling method that supports the specification of security and privacy requirements in a structured and analyzable form. Our motivation is that, in many contexts, use cases are common practice for the elicitation of functional requirements and should also be adapted for describing security requirements. Method: We integrate an existing approach for modeling security and privacy requirements in terms of security threats, their mitigations, and their relations to use cases in a misuse case diagram. We introduce new security-related templates, i.e., a mitigation template and a misuse case template for specifying mitigation schemes and misuse case specifications in a structured and analyzable manner. Natural language processing can then be used to automatically report inconsistencies among artifacts and between the templates and specifications. Results: We successfully applied our approach to an industrial healthcare project and report lessons learned and results from structured interviews with engineers. Conclusion: Since our approach supports the precise specification and analysis of security threats, threat scenarios and their mitigations, it also supports decision making and the analysis of compliance to standards.

Supporting use case based requirements engineering

Use cases that describe possible interactions involving a system and its environment are increasingly being accepted as effective means for functional requirements elicitation and analysis. In the current practice, informal definitions of use cases are used and the analysis process is manual. In this paper, we present an approach supported by a tool for use cases based requirements engineering. Our approach includes use cases formalization, a restricted form of natural language for use cases description, and the derivation of an executable specification as well as a simulation environment from use cases.

Overcoming communication obstacles in user-analyst interaction for functional requirements elicitation

The importance of requirement engineering in the software development process has been widely recognised by the scientific community. One of the major error sources that arise in this phase is represented by ineffectual communication between users and analysts.Valusek and Fryback in [32] identify three classes of communication obstacles to a successful elicitation of requirements. Purpose of this paper is to discuss these obstacles and to identify the structure of a CASE tool that may allow to overcome them.

Reuse of requirements and specifications

It is claimed that requirements engineering, as a problem of formalization and agreement, can benefit from raising the level of reusability up to functional requirements elicitation and specification levels. At these levels, it is important to support incomplete information in a declarative, reusable and refineable form. For that purpose, a model is proposed which is based on temporal theories, in the logical sense, together with a set of incremental specification techniques formalized through categorial constructions on theories.