Model-Driven Requirements Engineering Research Articles

Quality Assured Model-Driven Requirements Engineering and Software Development

Quality Assured Model-Driven Requirements Engineering and Software Development

Transforming and tracing reused requirements models to home automation models

ContextModel-Driven Software Development (MDSD) has emerged as a very promising approach to cope with the inherent complexity of modern software-based systems. Furthermore, it is well known that the Requirements Engineering (RE) stage is critical for a project’s success. Despite the importance of RE, MDSD approaches commonly leave textual requirements specifications to one side. ObjectiveOur aim is to integrate textual requirements specifications into the MDSD approach by using the MDSD techniques themselves, including metamodelling and model transformations. The proposal is based on the assumption that a reuse-based Model-Driven Requirements Engineering (MDRE) approach will improve the requirements engineering stage, the quality of the development models generated from requirements models, and will enable the traces from requirements to other development concepts (such as analysis or design) to be maintained. MethodThe approach revolves around the Requirements Engineering Metamodel, denominated as REMM, which supports the definition of the boilerplate based textual requirements specification languages needed for the definition of model transformation from application requirements models to platform-specific application models and code. ResultsThe approach has been evaluated through its application to Home Automation (HA) systems. The HA Requirement Specification Language denominated as HAREL is used to define application requirements models which will be automatically transformed and traced to the application model conforming to the HA Domain Specific Language. ConclusionsAn anonymous online survey has been conducted to evaluate the degree of acceptance by both HA application developers and MDSD practitioners. The main conclusion is that 66.7% of the HA experts polled strongly agree that the automatic transformation of the requirements models to HA models improves the quality of the HA models. Moreover, 58.3% of the HA participants strongly agree with the usefulness of the traceability matrix which links requirements to HA functional units in order to discover which devices are related to a specific requirement. We can conclude that the experts we have consulted agree with the proposal we are presenting here, since the average mark given is 4 out of 5.

Integrating ontologies, model driven, and CNL in a multi-viewed approach for requirements engineering

Research in requirements engineering (RE) has been growing in the last few years. RE researchers are generally concerned with a set of open issues such as: (i) the need for a well-defined process to identify and specify the requirements scope, (ii) suitable mechanisms to support communication among different stakeholders and development teams involved in the RE process, (iii) mechanisms to deal with the inherent volatility of requirements, and (iv) the need for a traceability scheme to help managing requirements in the downstream phases of the development process. In this work, we address some of these open issues by proposing the use of an iterative and incremental model-driven RE process combined with the employment of different notations such as controlled natural language and ontology in each activity of RE process. Based on the argument that there is no single notation suitable to represent requirements from the different perspectives of all the stakeholders and development teams, we propose a RE process encompassing different views, representing each perspective. This paper describes the proposed process, its tool support, and presents a controlled experiment that illustrates the proposal and evaluates its benefits.