Requirements Gathering Research Articles

Automatically classifying user requests in crowdsourcing requirements engineering

In order to make a software project succeed, it is necessary to determine the requirements for systems and to document them in a suitable manner. Many ways for requirements elicitation have been discussed. One way is to gather requirements with crowdsourcing methods, which has been discussed for years and is called crowdsourcing requirements engineering. User requests forums in open source communities, where users can propose their expected features of a software product, are common examples of platforms for gathering requirements from the crowd. Requirements collected from these platforms are often informal text descriptions and we name them user requests. In order to transform user requests into structured software requirements, it is better to know the class of requirements that each request belongs to so that each request can be rewritten according to corresponding requirement templates. In this paper, we propose an effective classification methodology by employing both project-specific and non-project-specific keywords and machine learning algorithms. The proposed strategy does well in achieving high classification accuracy by using keywords as features, reducing considerable manual efforts in building machine learning based classifiers, and having stable performance in finding minority classes no matter how few instances they have.

Gathering, evaluating and managing customer feedback during aircraft production.

This paper proposes a systematic approach for gathering requirements during production through customers' remote access to the partially and fully assembled aircraft and its modules. The paper also proposes an evaluation and management of these recorded requirements and their utilization in the development of an aircraft. Modular product architecture is used for the modular organization of the product, product-service, and production system for the gathering, evaluation and management of feedback for product development perspectives. A mobile and wearable augmented reality system is used to virtually walk through the partially or fully manufactured product and to compare the status of the production with the product model to be produced. Change requests are captured as customer feedback. The knowledge thus acquired can be overlaid (augmented) on the real product, i.e. the aircraft. This approach is able to record the dynamic requirements of targeted customers. These changes can be carried out in the current version of the aircraft, and also incorporated into future versions. The implementation using case studies is presented for gathering feedback during assembly as well as for evaluating and managing the recorded feedback for exemplary modules (cabin and galley) of an aircraft. The use of the evaluation results in the development of an aircraft is also presented in the paper.

Designing a Proactive, Person-Centred, Digital Integrated Care System

ProACT, a Horizon 2020 project, aims to develop a technology ecosystem to support integrated care for older persons with multimorbidity (PwMs). The ecosystem will connect four key models of care and support – 1) homecare (including informal care), 2) hospital care, 3) community and social care 4) social support networks – and will be centred on the person at home self-managing their conditions with support from their care network. The development of a digital platform for integrated care has the potential to support existing practice, and to improve the management of a complex and integrated care plan, introducing new ways of collaboration between key actors. To understand care pathways for PwMs, we mapped the existing pathways across three EU countries – Ireland and Belgium, where ProACT will be trialled with 60 older adult participants and their care networks at each site, and Italy where a transferability study will take place. We also identified key stakeholders in the care ecosystems and conducted interviews and focus groups with 166 participants (including PwMs and support actors - informal and formal carers, pharmacists and a range of healthcare professionals) across the three countries, in order to understand their needs, requirements, challenges and expectations in relation to the potential use of ProACT. Some of the major challenges identified in this research involve the lack of standardised, integrated pathways for multimorbidity across the three countries. To better understand pathways for chronic disease management, we reviewed and compared the British NHS NICE pathways for single disease management of the ProACT conditions COPD, CHD, CHF and Diabetes. We adapted these pathways for each of the four ProACT conditions, focusing on those areas of relevance to the patient. We then compared these with existing pathways identified in each region. From this process, we identified 4 important steps within each individual disease pathway, as well as general older adult care pathways. These are: - Diagnosis - Development of a holistic care plan - Management of the medical and social conditions (remaining stable or improving) - Managing exacerbations These aspects of care will form the basis of ProACT and were further examined during the requirements gathering phase, to identify challenges faced by stakeholders along these pathways and how ProACT might support them. A key intersection where information exchange and service capacity is poorly coordinated and organised will be filled by the ProACT system. Thus, ProACT will collect and analyse data from PwMs and support actors via technology to improve the connections and flow between care delivery locations and improve intelligent decision making support. The outcome will be to increase PwM (and if available informal carers) capacity to inform home-based self-care by directing relevant support actors and services; improve the ability of services to understand the best delivery of care; provide 24/7 real time feedback to key support actors and services; provide information on the PwM at home and in the community. The approach will improve visibility of the PwM’s activity to support service delivery.

Towards a Multisemiotic and Multimodal Editor

Mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones, are increasingly present in the everyday life of young people. Despite such insertion, the use of those devices in scenarios such as m-learning is still a missed opportunity. In a previous work we verified that an editor that aggregates various kinds of media can help students in their studies. With that motivation in mind, we realized the Multimodal Editor – a useful tool to leverage the multimedia authorship. In this paper we describe our trajectory toward the Editor – requirements gathering, implementation, challenges, usage scenario and evaluation.

The Role Clarity Framework to Improve Requirements Gathering

Incorrect and incomplete requirements have been reported as two of the top reasons for information systems (IS) project failures. In order to address these concerns, several IS analysis and design studies have focused on understanding the business needs and organizational factors prior to specifying the requirements. In this research, we add to the existing incremental solutions, such as the work system method and goal-oriented requirements engineering, by proposing the Role Clarity Framework drawn from the theories of“role dynamics”and“goal setting and task performance”in organization studies. The Role Clarity Framework consists of three main concepts related to any organizational role: expectations, activities, and consequences. Based on the interactions among different roles, this framework demonstrates how the business goals and activities of each role, as played out by IS users, are formed and/or changed in the organization. Finally, the Role Clarity Framework helps IS analysts to improve their communication with users and anticipate changes in their requirements, thus improving the gathering of requirements for IS design.

Designing in between Local Government and the Public \u2013 Using Institutional Analysis in Interventions on Civic Infrastructures

Adapting and changing the systems and technologies involved in civic engagement with local government is among the key challenges of collaborative technologies for political participation. In such contexts, both existing sets of technologies and ingrained, often formalised practices, the ‘rules of the game’, constrain any opportunity for intervention. Additionally, ‘civic’ and expert groups with conflicting agendas and divergent demands on public choices assert their influence in these transformation programmes. The article argues that established methods in collaborative systems design have thus far overlooked the role of recurring actions involved in public participation as well as the formal rules and ingrained practices that construct them. Yet, such patterns present a valuable resource for design interventions. Thus, based on an institutional approach, the article outlines a methodology for requirement gathering by mapping the relations of actors, software and their use along identifiable action situations. The method called for a dialogue between socio-technical-spatial contexts of public service and specific actions taking place within it. Drawing on a case of organising civic engagement in urban planning, the article discusses how to find and trace existing practices across social settings, information technologies and material contexts where engagements take place. The approach underscores the existing institutional contexts in inspiring, opening and constraining the opportunities to support ‘civics’.

Tomorrow’s Health Data Scientists in the Making: 2 Years of Training & Capacity Building Activities with the Farr Institute

ABSTRACT
 ObjectivesThe poster will showcase the Training & Capacity Building Programme (TCBP) established by the Farr network that is available to PhD students and Early Career Researchers (ECRs) both from within and outside the network.
 ApproachThe authors are using a mixed-methods approach to present the current state of the art that has motivated the structure of the TCBP and how the programme has been received by students, academic and industry leaders.
 Since 2014, the Farr network education leads have worked on a unique education programme that aims to equip students with key professional and methodological skills required by the roles they are likely to take in their future careers.
 The content of the programme has been informed by current research in the fields of data linkage and analysis of big datasets as well as the immediate experience of researchers, and healthcare and industry leads working actively in the field.
 We have focussed on developing a community of practice through the provision of an environment that has enabled students to share experiences and knowledge and to start building their own networks of collaboration across the Farr centres.
 ResultsThe Farr network of PhD students comprises of approximately 66 students from a variety of backgrounds including bioinformatics, computer science, epidemiology, mathematics, psychology and statistics.
 The Farr network hosted 2 main events in 2015 that provided the foundation for 34 PhD students to come together to develop skills in written and oral communication, Public and Patient Involvement (PPI), problem-solving, requirements gathering, data visualisation and spatial data analysis.
 Formal feedback collected from each event suggests that the programme is received well by students who see it as a set of activities that complement their specialised PhD related education. Feedback from supervisors and future employers also suggests that this programme has facilitated the development of skills that are useful for their PhD and employment.
 ConclusionThe Farr network has laid the foundation for the community of practice around the analysis of real-world health datasets across the UK, and will continue to cultivate this through the enrichment of the programme.

Gathering requirements for advancing simulations in HPC infrastructures via science gateways

Compute-intensive simulations are often based on complex scientific theories and necessitate high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructures to deliver results in reasonable time. While domain researchers are experts in their field and apply sophisticated theoretical models in computational simulations, they are not necessarily also HPC experts or IT specialists in general. Thus, they appreciate easy-to-use solutions tailored to their research, which hide the complex underlying computing and data infrastructures. Science gateways form such end-to-end solutions and their development for compute-intensive simulations necessitates expertise to connect HPC research infrastructures including grid and cloud infrastructures to support with the efficient access to such resources. HPC experts and IT specialists fulfilling this task may have only rudimentary knowledge about the research domain of a simulation. Thus, it is crucial that they gather the requirements of a research use case, which they aim to support efficiently via a science gateway.In the last 10 years quite a few web development frameworks, science gateway frameworks and APIs with different foci and strengths have evolved to support the developers of science gateways in implementing an intuitive solution for a target research domain. The selection of a suitable technology for a specific use case is essential and helps reducing the effort in implementing the science gateway by re-using existing software or frameworks. Thus, a solution for a user community can be provided more efficiently. This paper introduces the general architecture of science gateways, goes into detail for criteria to design science gateways efficiently and gives examples of mature science gateways and science gateway frameworks.

Sustainable supplier performance scoring using audition check-list based fuzzy inference system: A case application in automotive spare part industry

With the global awareness of sustainability issues, sustainable development is being increasingly recognized by governments and industries. In addressing these issues, organizations worldwide have taken initiatives in adopting sustainability practices in their supply chain transferring it to sustainable supply chain management. In order to establish a responsible sustainable supply chain management, an effective way would be to make sure that the potential suppliers for procuring required components are precisely assessed and evaluated based on sustainable criteria. Therefore, this paper proposes a practical decision making approach to evaluate and select the most sustainable suppliers for an automotive spare part manufacturer licensed under a France-based automotive organization. Firstly, a requirement gathering approach, the audition check-list approach, is designed to facilitate the process of data gathering for supplier evaluation based on three pillars of sustainability. Next, the gathered data are processed using a proposed fuzzy inference system to remove impreciseness and vagueness in the gathered sustainability related data. The strength of this model falls into its applicability in data gathering phase which helps decision makers in manufacturing company to perform a fast audition of a typical supplier. Secondly, the final sustainable ranking of suppliers using the proposed fuzzy inference system provide a precise and less uncertain sustainability performance scoring which makes the developed approach a reliable system for making sustainable sourcing decisions. Comparison and sensitivity analysis are performed to evaluate the proficiency of the developed approach. Finally, theoretical and managerial implications together with conclusions of the study are presented.

Design for Customization: A New Paradigm for Product-Service System Development

In the traditional software development cycle, requirements gathering is considered the most critical phase. Getting the requirements right first time has become a dogma in software engineering because the correction of erroneous or incomplete requirements in later software development phases becomes overly expensive. For product-service systems (PSS), this dogma and standard requirements engineering (RE) approaches are not appropriate because classical RE is considered concluded, once a product service is delivered. For PSS it is impossible to foresee all future context conditions and customization needs customers may come up with after product deployment. In addition, the services supporting a complex hardware-software product depend on the individual product configuration a customer requires. For example, when a standard laser machine is equipped with one or more special sensors, new services may be needed that depend on sensor data from these new sources combined with other data generated by the standard machine configuration. Thus, we claim that RE needs to be extended to the deployment phase of a product and an agile approach is required to cope with emerging hardware and software requirements as a PSS is marketed. In this paper, a novel view-based model-driven engineering approach is proposed that enables collaborative product-service design and customization and copes with evolving, incomplete and unforeseen requirements. A prototype has been implemented as a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) and is currently validated on four industrial pilot cases as part of the H2020 project ICP4Life.

Impact Propagation of Human Errors on Software Requirements Volatility

Requirements volatility (RV) is one of the key risk sources in software development and maintenance projects because of the frequent changes made to the software. Human faults and errors are major factors contributing to requirement change in software development projects. As such, predicting requirements volatility is a challenge to risk management in the software area. Previous studies only focused on certain aspects of the human error in this area. This study specifically identifies and analyses the impact of human errors on requirements gathering and requirements volatility. It proposes a model based on responses to a survey questionnaire administered to 215 participants who have experience in software requirement gathering. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and structural equation modelling (SEM) were used to analyse the correlation of human errors and requirement volatility. The results of the analysis confirm the correlation between human errors and RV. The results show that human actions have a higher impact on RV compared to human perception. The study provides insights into software management to understand socio-technical aspects of requirements volatility in order to control risk management. Human actions and perceptions respectively are a root cause contributing to human errors that lead to RV.

Establishment of Requirements and Methodology for the Development and Implementation of GreyMatters, a Memory Clinic Information System.

The aim of the paper is to establish the requirements and methodology for the development process of GreyMatters, a memory clinic system, outlining the conceptual, practical, technical and ethical challenges, and the experiences of capturing clinical and research oriented data along with the implementation of the system. The methodology for development of the information system involved phases of requirements gathering, modeling and prototype creation, and 'bench testing' the prototype with experts. The standard Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) recommended approach for the specifications of software requirements was adopted. An electronic health record (EHR) standard, EN13606 was used, and clinical modelling was done through archetypes and the project complied with data protection and privacy legislation. The requirements for GreyMatters were established. Though the initial development was complex, the requirements, methodology and standards adopted made the construction, deployment, adoption and population of a memory clinic and research database feasible. The electronic patient data including the assessment scales provides a rich source of objective data for audits and research and to establish study feasibility and identify potential participants for the clinical trials. The establishment of requirements and methodology, addressing issues of data security and confidentiality, future data compatibility and interoperability and medico-legal aspects such as access controls and audit trails, led to a robust and useful system. The evaluation supports that the system is an acceptable tool for clinical, administrative, and research use and forms a useful part of the wider information architecture.

Process-Oriented Requirements Engineering: User-Centric LORS Framework

In recent years, the process orientation requirements engineering field has received significant interest. However, dealing with ordinary users within an enterprise for developing as-is business process is very complex because this requires skills, responsibility, knowledge, and expertise of business processes. This research answers the following questions: 1) how to systematically gather information regarding as-is business process requirements in an informal environment and by non-expert users? and 2) how can an enterprise refine the identified business process with a semantic process model? The primary purpose of this research is to develop a supporting framework that is suitable for the definition of an as-is business process to be deployed within the enterprise environment. Hence, the focus is on gathering requirements to define the as-is business process. This framework concentrates on three significant aspects of this process: development, refinement, and serialization the semantics of the process model. To accomplish this objective, the LORS framework has been proposed, which consists of four phases (List, Order, Refinement, and Serialization). The framework presents a new unique technique to identify the business process, refine the process, and generate the model semantics. This study assumes that a simple and complete framework will help non-expert users define a high-quality as-is process, such that enhance and facilitate the matching process with existing reference models. We present a case study, evaluate the case study relative to specified criteria, and research the limitations and implications discovered from our research. This research concludes that the LORS framework is simple, flexible, visible, interactive, dynamic, and effective.

A Role Clarity Framework to Improve Requirements Gathering

Incorrect and incomplete requirements have been reported as two of the top reasons for information system project failures. To address this concern, several studies have focused on understanding the business issues and organizational factors prior to specifying the requirements. In this research, we add to the existing incremental solutions (e.g., work system theory and goal based requirements engineering) by proposing the role clarity framework drawn from the theory of role dynamics (Kahn et al. 1964) in organization studies. The role clarity framework demonstrates how business activities of users are formed and/or changed. The framework helps analysts to improve their communication with users and anticipate changes in their requirements, thus improving the gathering of requirements for IS design.

A survey of autonomic computing methods in digital service ecosystems

Service engineering of digital service ecosystems can be associated with several challenges, such as change and evolution of requirements; gathering of quality requirements and assessment; and uncertainty caused by dynamic nature and unknown deployment environment, composition and users. Therefore, the complexity and dynamics in which these digital services are deployed call for solutions to make them autonomic. Until now there has been no up-to-date review of the scientific literature on the application of the autonomic computing initiative in the digital service ecosystems domain. This article presents a review and comparison of autonomic computing methods in digital service ecosystems from the perspective of service engineering, i.e., requirements engineering and architecting of services. The review is based on systematic queries in four leading scientific databases and Google Scholar, and it is organized in four thematic research areas. A comparison framework has been defined which can be used as a guide for comparing the different methods selected. The goal is to discover which methods are suitable for the service engineering of digital service ecosystems with autonomic computing capabilities, highlight what the shortcomings of the methods are, and identify which research activities need to be conducted in order to overcome these shortcomings. The comparison reveals that none of the existing methods entirely fulfills the requirements that are defined in the comparison framework.

Critical Evaluation of Prince2 and Agile Project Management Methodologies for a complex project

Most of major IT projects failed due to its complexity and the project complexity is determined by the intensity of business requirements and its fluctuant nature. Prince2 is the solution for a sophisticated project because of its vast range of stage driven processes which mainly focus on project benefits in each stage. The main objective of Prince2 is breaking the complexity into small parts/stages which can be achieved easily. The seven processes of Prince2 cover the entire project lifecycle including requirement gathering, as-is process, development, and product delivery. The seven themes cover major concerns of any project including business case, risk management and quality on deliverables. The seven principles are the seven pillars of Prince2 which sustain its standard. It is understood that the Agile project management methodology is suitable for medium and small scaled projects. The five groups processes of Agile project management intensely focus on development activities and make sure the required product is delivered without any error. It is recommended that Prince2 is certainly suitable for complex projects as a dominant project management methodology, however, Scrum technique can be used for depth IT development as a secondary project management methodology within Prince2.

Agile Requirements Engineering: A systematic literature review

Nowadays, Agile Software Development (ASD) is used to cope with increasing complexity in system development. Hybrid development models, with the integration of User-Centered Design (UCD), are applied with the aim to deliver competitive products with a suitable User Experience (UX). Therefore, stakeholder and user involvement during Requirements Engineering (RE) are essential in order to establish a collaborative environment with constant feedback loops. The aim of this study is to capture the current state of the art of the literature related to Agile RE with focus on stakeholder and user involvement. In particular, we investigate what approaches exist to involve stakeholder in the process, which methodologies are commonly used to present the user perspective and how requirements management is been carried out.We conduct a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) with an extensive quality assessment of the included studies. We identified 27 relevant papers. After analyzing them in detail, we derive deep insights to the following aspects of Agile RE: stakeholder and user involvement, data gathering, user perspective, integrated methodologies, shared understanding, artifacts, documentation and Non-Functional Requirements (NFR). Agile RE is a complex research field with cross-functional influences. This study will contribute to the software development body of knowledge by assessing the involvement of stakeholder and user in Agile RE, providing methodologies that make ASD more human-centric and giving an overview of requirements management in ASD.

Gap Analysis in Specifying Porting Requirements for Mobile Application

Background/Objectives: To propose gap analysis technique is to gather porting requirements for mobile application porting project. Methods/Statistical Analysis: Static-group Comparison method was used to evaluate the effectiveness of this technique. 3 mobile development organizations that are specializing in mobile application porting project were participated in this study. All together 10 participants were involved. Interview and questionnaire technique were used to identify the characteristics and issues during gathering of porting requirements. From the analysis, at the moment porting requirements are gathered using ad-hoc method or using their own intuitions. Hence the porting requirements are ambiguous and not consistent. Findings: Formalizing the porting requirement activity is essential to ensure the completeness and quality of the ported requirements. Gap analysis technique is significantly faster with precise requirements than the ad-hoc techniques. Application/Improvements: Gap analysis offers a formalized way to gather porting requirement to ensure the completeness and quality of a ported mobile application.

Requirements gathering: the journey

Requirements gathering in Information Systems is a critical part of any project, as any issues with the elicited requirements have an impact on the project as a whole and in some cases can lead to project failure. To address the issues with gathering effective requirements this paper proposes viewing the requirements gathering process as a human centred journey. The journey being critical to the requirements gathering experience of participants. This allows for a better understanding of the requirements gathering process and its effectiveness. This study helps with the decision-making process by assisting with engineering an effective requirements gathering approach which ultimately follows a design science approach and its objective is to build a prototype of a ‘requirements gathering journey’ canvas.

A Mobile App Development Guideline for Hospital Settings: Maximizing the Use of and Minimizing the Security Risks of "Bring Your Own Devices" Policies.

BackgroundHospitals today are introducing new mobile apps to improve patient care and workflow processes. Mobile device adoption by hospitals fits with present day technology behavior; however, requires a deeper look into hospital device policies and the impact on patients, staff, and technology development. Should hospitals spend thousands to millions of dollars to equip all personnel with a mobile device that is only used in a hospital environment? Allowing health care professionals to use personal mobile devices at work, known as bring-your-own-device (BYOD), has the potential to support both the hospital and its employees to deliver effective and efficient care.ObjectiveThe objectives of this research were to create a mobile app development guideline for a BYOD hospital environment, apply the guideline to the development of an in-house mobile app called TaskList, pilot the TaskList app within Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH), and refine the guideline based on the app pilot. TaskList is an Apple operating system (iOS)-based app designed for medical residents to monitor, create, capture, and share daily collaborative tasks associated with patients.MethodsTo create the BYOD guidelines, we developed TaskList that required the use of mobile devices among medical resident. The TaskList app was designed in four phases: (1) mobile app guideline development, (2) requirements gathering and developing of TaskList fitting the guideline, (3) deployment of TaskList using BYOD with end-users, and (4) refinement of the guideline based on the TaskList pilot. Phase 1 included understanding the existing hospital BYOD policies and conducting Web searches to find best practices in software development for a BYOD environment. Phase 1 also included gathering subject matter input from the Information Services Department (ISD) at BCH. Phase 2 involved the collaboration between the Innovation Acceleration Program at BCH, the ISD Department and the TaskList Clinical team in understanding what features should be built into the app. Phase 3 involved deployment of TaskList on a clinical floor at BCH. Lastly, Phase 4 gathered the lessons learned from the pilot to refine the guideline.ResultsFourteen practical recommendations were identified to create the BCH Mobile Application Development Guideline to safeguard custom applications in hospital BYOD settings. The recommendations were grouped into four categories: (1) authentication and authorization, (2) data management, (3) safeguarding app environment, and (4) remote enforcement. Following the guideline, the TaskList app was developed and then was piloted with an inpatient ward team.ConclusionsThe Mobile Application Development guideline was created and used in the development of TaskList. The guideline is intended for use by developers when addressing integration with hospital information systems, deploying apps in BYOD health care settings, and meeting compliance standards, such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations.