Requirement Engineering Phase Research Articles

Characterizing the Software Acceptance Testing and the Inclusion of People with Disabilities by Means of a Systematic Mapping

Acceptance testing is a test technique where the final user evaluates the actual use of the software. In this test, software must meet the acceptance criteria defined on the requirement engineering phase to be approved. This paper describes the participation of the person with a disability in acceptance testing in terms of testing approaches, tools and user feedback. By performing a systematic mapping, we analyzed 609 articles, of which 58 were considered to answer four research questions. We identified that acceptance tests have no standard and present a dispersed variety of approaches and tools. We also few acceptance tests studies applied to testers with disabilities, although this approach has been rising in recent years. Considering accessibility for all users when including them in acceptance tests can ensure greater reach of users to systems

Security risks of global software development life cycle: Industry practitioner's perspective

AbstractSoftware security has become increasingly important because the malicious attack and other hacker risks of a computer system have grown popularity in the last few years. As a result, several researchers have examined security solutions as early as the requirement engineering phase. With the growth of the software business and the internet, there is a need to understand the security risks against each phase of the software development life cycle (SDLC). This study aims to empirically investigate and prioritize the risks that could negatively impact the software security aspects of SDLC in the context of global software development (GSD). To achieve the study objectives, we conducted an industrial empirical study to determine the impact of software security threats against each phase of SDLC. Furthermore, the fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) was used to prioritize the list of software security risks against the SDLC. The results and analysis of this study provide a ranked‐based decision‐making framework, which assists the practitioners in considering the most critical security risks on priority. The results show “improper plan for secure requirement identification, inception, authentication, authorization, and privacy,” “lack of threat models updating,” “lack of output validation,” “lack of certification in the final release and archive,” and “spoofing” as the top‐ranked security risks of SDLC in GSD. In addition, the application of FAHP is novel in this domain as it is helpful to address multicriteria decision‐making problems.

Logic Requirement Model of Web Based e-learning in Learning Management System for Features Selection

Requirement engineering phase is logically known to check the compliance of application such in web-based e-learning development. This research indicates that basic aspects of web-based e-learning can be used to identify or elicit the early requirement and classify it into the functional and non-functional approach. The research found that even in learning management system (LMS) Based, some of the web-based e-learning are using for different goals. It is challenging to develop a system of web-based e-learning to get the requirement focus at the early phase and select the feature that can fill the requirement. This study goal is developing a requirement model to describe the web requirement focus and decompose every web requirement aspects through logical modeling. Analysis due to the interaction and coverage of web-based e-learning is combined with web modeling aspects including content, interaction, functional, navigation and configuration to show the relation among detail requirements. Requirements are found in a systematic way by modeling its logic to determine the basic needs in the using of learning management system. The result from this requirement model proves that web-based e-learning requirements are sustain-ably identified to complement each requirements and can be implemented to classify the specific requirement to select the appropriate web-based e-learning features from early phase development.

Management of Implicit Requirements Data in Large SRS Documents

Implicit Requirements (IMR) identification is part of the Requirements Engineering (RE) phase in Software Engineering during which data is gathered to create SRS (Software Requirements Specifications) documents. As opposed to explicit requirements clearly stated, IMRs constitute subtle data and need to be inferred. Research has shown that IMRs are crucial to the success of software development. Many software systems can encounter failures due to lack of IMR data management. SRS documents are large, often hundreds of pages, due to which manually identifying IMRs by human software engineers is not feasible. Moreover, such data is evergrowing due to the expansion of software systems. It is thus important to address the crucial issue of IMR data management. This article presents a survey on IMRs in SRS documents with the definition and overview of IMR data, detailed taxonomy of IMRs with explanation and examples, practices in managing IMR data, and tools for IMR identification. In addition to reviewing classical and state-of-the-art approaches, we highlight trends and challenges and point out open issues for future research. This survey article is interesting based on data quality, hidden information retrieval, veracity and salience, and knowledge discovery from large textual documents with complex heterogeneous data.

Toward Requirements for Embedded Systems

Context: Embedded System (ES) is a component of a larger system embedded in a product, it is designed to repeatedly perform a specific function, while maintaining its operation under different constraints. For this reason, these systems are highly complex. Therefore, the challenges for effective and efficient development are immense. Many problems are related to mistakes in the requirements engineering phase. Thus, a Requirements Engineering (RE) process is crucial in ES development. Objective: to analyze and understand studies of RE approaches that are used for embedded systems development. Method: We carried out a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) in order to find answers to our questions and better understand the requirements engineering context for ES. Results: We uncovered 92 studies and (1) evidence the benefits to using the studies in requirements engineering activities; (2) we found out the RE phases that are attracting more attention; (3) the main requirements modeling styles used; (4) the types of requirements modelled; (5) we identified 6 embedded systems domain in which requirements engineering is taken into account; (6) the use of tools to support their approaches, and (7) the existing challenges/problems. We also proposed a research agenda. Conclusions: Hence, in this paper we present a body of knowledge in ER for SE derived from a large-scale SLR. We believe the results will benefit both researchers and practitioners.

Improvement Quality of Software Requirements Using Requirement Negotiation System for Supporting Decision

The Requirement Engineering phase, where all requests and software requirements of the user and the client are delivered, understood and agreed upon. However, often the developers are just too focused on implementing the software, even though the Requirements Engineering phase is a phase that can have a big impact. The impact is not only on the final product but also on the development process itself. In this study, the authors conducted software development negotiation of software requirements as a medium for stakeholders to negotiate the requirements of software products. In the negotiation system, the author will provide a means of decision support or group decision support system that a method of resolving conflicts. The main objectives of this work are twofold: 1) to assist the negotiation process between stakeholders and 2) to improvement quality software after negotiation. The workings of the E-Voting method are by giving choices to each sub-specification that has been chosen by stakeholders. We will select the choice that has the highest number of votes as a specification. We used prototyping as a method of developing a system life cycle because prototyping is very open to improvements that might occur after it releases the prototype version system. The results of evaluations show that the system has a high success rate based on 3 dimensions of testing, Performance (80.5%), Usability (78.5%), and User Satisfaction (78%).

Are These Requirements Risky: A Proposal of an IoT-Based Requirements Risk Estimation Framework

Internet of Things (IoT) systems are revolutionizing traditional living to a new digital living style. In the past, a lot of investigations have been carried out to improve the technological challenges and issues of IoT and have focused on achieving the full potential of IoT. The foremost requisite for IoT software system developers seeking a competitive edge is to include project-specific features and meet customer expectations effectively and accurately. Any failures during the Requirements Engineering (RE) phase can result in direct or indirect consequences for each succeeding phase of development. The challenge is far more immense because of the lack of approaches for IoT-based RE. The objective of this paper is to propose a requirements risk management model for IoT systems. The method regarding the proposed model estimates requirements risk by considering both customers’ and developers’ perceptions. It uses multiple criteria using intuitionistic fuzzy logic and analytical technique. This will help to handle the uncertainty and vagueness of human perception, providing a well-defined two-dimensional indication of customer value and risk. The validity of the approach is tested on real project data and is supported with a user study. To the best of our understanding, literature lacks the trade-off analysis at the RE level in IoT systems and this presented work fills this prerequisite in a novel way by improving (i) requirements risk assessment for IoT systems and (ii) handling developers’ subjective judgments of multiple conflicting criteria, yielding more concrete and more observable results.

Classification of Non-Functional Requirements From IoT Oriented Healthcare Requirement Document.

Internet of Things (IoT) involves a set of devices that aids in achieving a smart environment. Healthcare systems, which are IoT-oriented, provide monitoring services of patients' data and help take immediate steps in an emergency. Currently, machine learning-based techniques are adopted to ensure security and other non-functional requirements in smart health care systems. However, no attention is given to classifying the non-functional requirements from requirement documents. The manual process of classifying the non-functional requirements from documents is erroneous and laborious. Missing non-functional requirements in the Requirement Engineering (RE) phase results in IoT oriented healthcare system with compromised security and performance. In this research, an experiment is performed where non-functional requirements are classified from the IoT-oriented healthcare system's requirement document. The machine learning algorithms considered for classification are Logistic Regression (LR), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Multinomial Naive Bayes (MNB), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), ensemble, Random Forest (RF), and hybrid KNN rule-based machine learning (ML) algorithms. The results show that our novel hybrid KNN rule-based machine learning algorithm outperforms others by showing an average classification accuracy of 75.9% in classifying non-functional requirements from IoT-oriented healthcare requirement documents. This research is not only novel in its concept of using a machine learning approach for classification of non-functional requirements from IoT-oriented healthcare system requirement documents, but it also proposes a novel hybrid KNN-rule based machine learning algorithm for classification with better accuracy. A new dataset is also created for classification purposes, comprising requirements related to IoT-oriented healthcare systems. However, since this dataset is small and consists of only 104 requirements, this might affect the generalizability of the results of this research.

Design of Security Taxonomy in Requirement Engineering

Non Functional Requirements (NFR) are important in all phases of software development and results in quality of software to be built. It is observed that security requirements are incorporated and identified later in the software development life cycle. Security as non functional requirements imposes new challenges in managing confidential data and preserving its integrity. The security requirements and related artefacts must be considered from Requirement Engineering (RE) phase to implementation phase. This paper focuses on new design of taxonomy of security in Requirement Engineering. The design covers the major properties of security which are required in developing any web based, secured, confidential and integrity oriented system.

A framework for prototyping Distributed Cyber–Physical Systems with reference nets

It is challenging to ascertain a correct composition of an envisaged Distributed Cyber–Physical System (DCPS) with the user and physical interfaces and requisite interactions. The gap in understanding the user’s ideation and designer’s manifestation in the early stages of the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) results in requirement errors. These requirement errors result in a higher cost due to rework if discovered in later phases of the SDLC. Hence, there is a need to incorporate dynamic models as system prototypes to facilitate early visibility of the designer’s manifestation to the user community in the requirement engineering phase of SDLC. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap.This paper presents a framework to construct and validate DCPS composition as a rapid prototype. The idea is to facilitate effective communication among the user and developer community. The framework uses Reference net formalism extended with GUI enhancements to achieve the wire-frame implementation of the DCPS prototype under investigation. A containment management scenario in the COVID-19 context illustrates the applicability of the presented framework. The execution of end-to-end scenarios spanning multiple user interfaces with simulated sensors, actuators, and environmental operations within a distributed setup gives a realistic feel of the system operations and dynamics. The presented approach facilitates early validation, identification, and rectification of requirement errors through multiple refinement cycles. In our understanding, this work has not been suggested earlier.

VORDi*

Cloud computing services mature both economically and technologically and play a more and more extensive role in the domain of software and information systems engineering. SaaS offers an advantage for both service providers and consumers. SaaS is faced with the question of appropriate techniques applied at an early phase of requirements engineering of the producing system. The paper highlights two traditional methods, namely i* and VORD, belonging respectively to goal-oriented requirements engineering and viewpoints approaches. The approach proposed dealing with the requirements elicitation in the context of software-as-a-service (SaaS). So, the approach benefits from strengths of both VORD and i* models and proposes a combination of them in a new approach, namely VORDi*.

Hybrid analytic hierarchy process-based quantitative satisfaction propagation in goal-oriented requirements engineering through sensitivity analysis

In the early phase of Requirements Engineering (RE), Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) has been found to be a valuable tool. GORE plays a vital role in requirements analysis such as alternative selection decision-making process. This is carried out to determine the practicability and effectiveness of alternative approaches to arriving at quality goals. Most GORE models handle alternative selection based on an extremely coarse-grained qualitative approach, making it impossible to distinguish two alternatives. Many proposals are based on quantitative alternative choices, yet they do not offer a clear decision-making judgement. We propose a fuzzy-based quantitative approach to perform goal analysis using inter-actor dependencies in the i* framework, thereby addressing the ambiguity problems that arise in qualitative analysis. The goal analysis in the i* framework was performed by propagating the impact and weight values throughout the entire hierarchy of an actor. In this article, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is adapted with GORE to discuss the evaluation of alternative strategies of the i* goal model of interdependent actors. By using a quantitative requirement prioritisation method such as the AHP, weights of importance are assigned to softgoals to obtain a multi-objective optimised function. The proposed hybrid method measures the degree of contribution of alternatives to the fulfillment of top softgoals. The integration of AHP with goal anlaysis helps to measure alternative options against each other based on the requirements problem. This approach also includes the sensitivity analysis, which helps to check the system behaviour for change in input parameter. Hence, it facilitates decision-making for the benefit of the requirements’ analyst. To explain the proposed solution, this paper considers a telemedicine system case study from the existing literature.

Role of situational method engineering to improve visual information systems in agile distributed environment

Software product prone to continuous evolution due to increase in the use of technology. Therefore, more stakeholders are involved in software evolution increases the cost and complexity. This required optimization of resources and cost to handle evolution with Global Software Development (GSD) to utilize time zones efficiently. The significance challenge of GSD reports: time zone difference, geographical location, communication delays, knowledge sharing, control among stakeholders and development team. Because of these challenges, the requirements for development in GSD environment are also challenge as compared to on site development. Different requirement engineering methods have been used to improve the requirements analysis to deal with ambiguities and inconsistency in large set of requirements. The customization and tailoring of requirements according to changing project’s situations required to improve project development with reusing existing agile methods during requirement engineering phase. Moreover, complex information systems where heterogeneity is inevitable that implies the involvement of divergent stakeholders and necessitate a comprehensive framework to capture multidimensional viewpoints and fulfill aforementioned issues. Therefore, a situational multi-dimensional agile requirement engineering method has been proposed to support team and stakeholders’ viewpoints. The schema of the proposed method is based on challenges recognized by performing Literature Review. Then proposed method has been evaluated via experimental approach and statistical analysis conducted to validated reliability of data collected. This result is significant approved both practically and statistically that the proposed approach ease to use, implement, trained and increased productivity and performance. Hence, the experimental study for the evaluation of the proposed approach results concluded that, proposed approach is the important multimedia tool for supporting organization and distributed development team for information sharing, collaboration, product development.

The Impact of Controlled Vocabularies on Requirements Engineering Activities: A Systematic Mapping Study

Context: The use of controlled vocabularies (CVs) aims to increase the quality of the specifications of the software requirements, by producing well-written documentation to reduce both ambiguities and complexity. Many studies suggest that defects introduced at the requirements engineering (RE) phase have a negative impact, significantly higher than defects in the later stages of the software development lifecycle. However, the knowledge we have about the impact of using CVs, in specific RE activities, is very scarce. Objective: To identify and classify the type of CVs, and the impact they have on the requirements engineering phase of software development. Method: A systematic mapping study, collecting empirical evidence that is published up to July 2019. Results: This work identified 2348 papers published pertinent to CVs and RE, but only 90 primary published papers were chosen as relevant. The process of data extraction revealed that 79 studies reported the use of ontologies, whereas the remaining 11 were focused on taxonomies. The activities of RE with greater empirical support were those of specification (29 studies) and elicitation (28 studies). Seventeen different impacts of the CVs on the RE activities were classified and ranked, being the two most cited: guidance and understanding (38%), and automation and tool support (22%). Conclusions: The evolution of the last 10 years in the number of published papers shows that interest in the use of CVs remains high. The research community has a broad representation, distributed across the five continents. Most of the research focuses on the application of ontologies and taxonomies, whereas the use of thesauri and folksonomies is less reported. The evidence demonstrates the usefulness of the CVs in all RE activities, especially during elicitation and specification, helping developers understand, facilitating the automation process and identifying defects, conflicts and ambiguities in the requirements. Collaboration in research between academic and industrial contexts is low and should be promoted.

Machine Learning Evaluation of the Requirement Engineering Process Models for Cloud Computing and Security Issues

In the requirement engineering phase, the team members work to get the user requirements, comprehend them and specify them for the next process. There are many models for the requirement engineering phase. There is a need to select the best Requirement Engineering model, and integrate it with cloud computing, that can give the best response to the users and software developers and avoid mistakes in the requirement engineering phase. In this study, these models are integrated with the cloud computing domain, and we report on the security considerations of all the selected models. Four requirement engineering process models are selected for this study: the Linear approach, the Macaulay Linear approach, and the Iterative and Spiral models. The focus of this study is to check the security aspects being introduced by the cloud platform and assess the feasibility of these models for the popular cloud environment SaaS. For the classification of the security aspects that affect the performance of these model, a framework is proposed, and we check the results regarding selected security parameters and RE models. By classifying the selected RE models for security aspects based on deep learning techniques, we determine that the Loucopoulos and Karakostas iterative requirements engineering process model performs better than all the other models.

A Study on Reuse-based Requirements Engineering by Utilizing Knowledge Pattern

Software development has become an essential part of many industries over the past decade. The use of software has become an essential element for the organization to support its operation and business. Some software has certain features in common, which allow its requirements to be used repetitively in the requirement engineering phase. This paper presents a study on knowledge patterns for reuse-based requirements engineering. Reuse-based requirements engineering is saving the effort to conduct the process and, at the same time maintaining the standard since reused requirements come with its properties as well. Software development is an iterative process itself and so does the knowledge it holds in every iteration. When analysts perform many iterations of elicitation processes, it is often the case that a significant amount of requirements is recurring and similar software system will likely benefit from them. This research adopted a literature review method to investigate and to present current studies on knowledge pattern for the purpose of reuse. Knowledge reuse by utilizing knowledge pattern is becoming a significant method in software requirements engineering as it safes the effort of developing requirements from scratch. The study found that a specific pattern is required to develop good requirements specification. A proposed prototype to deploy reuse-based requirements engineering is also presented and evaluated. Experts’ judgment method is used for evaluation by adapting the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The results showed that reusing knowledge pattern expedites the requirements elicitation process and improves the requirements quality.

Prioritization of Software Functional Requirements from Developers Perspective

Prioritizing software requirements is important and difficult task during requirements management phase of requirements engineering. To ensure timely delivery of project, software developers have to prioritize functional requirements. The importance of prioritization increases when size of requirements is big. Software for large enterprises like the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are more likely to be developed by a team of software developers where large size requirements are distributed in parallel team members. However, requirements are dependent on each other, therefore development of pre-requisite requirements must be carefully timed and should be implemented first. Therefore, assigning importance and priority to some requirements over others is necessary so that requirements can be available on time to developers. This paper proposes a prioritization approach for functional requirements on the basis of their importance during implementation. The design of research method consists of Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) technique based on spanning trees. Through spanning trees, dependent requirements were linked in hierarchical structure and then AHP were applied. As a result of prioritization, requirements were distributed in such a way that dependency among requirements of developers were kept minimum as much as possible so that waiting time of requirements for their pre-requisite were reduced. With reduced effect of dependency in requirements of parallel developers, timely delivery of software projects can be assured.

Partly-Automated Scheme (PAS) Reinforced Framework to Prioritize Requirements with Abbreviated User Involvement and Verdict through AHP

Extremely significant phase of SDLC is Requirement Engineering . Building of software and its functionalities successfully is exclusively based on the requirements gathered from the user of the project. The accomplishment of the end product has direct relationship with this Requirement Phase. Requirement Prioritization Process (one of the process) in the Requirement Engineering phase supports the engineers to work out and identify the prioritization among the requirements. From the available methods to prioritize the requirement, AHP is viable but not for large size projects. This work primarily concentrated on applying AHP for bigger projects. In this paper, we constructed a framework to prioritize the requirements with AHP considering Implementation Simplicity for Large Scale project, reduced number of comparisons and precise Stakeholder’s Participation. The proposed framework has been assessed through an exploratory case study that has fixed number of requirements and the status after the arrival of new requirements to the priority list. This is to know about the actuality of the proposed framework, which has been conducted in a software company. The main findings and lessons erudite from the effort are presented.

An Automated Tool for Inspection of Requirements Engineering Techniques

From last few decades, researchers and practitioners have well recognized the significance of Requirements Engineering. Requirements Engineering stage is the foundation stone on which the entire building named software can be built. There are several Requirements Engineering (RE) techniques exists but requirements engineer choose a specific technique for a particular software project with their own preferences or organization standards. There is not only little guidance available for analyzing Requirements Engineering techniques but also all the existing researches focus on qualitative measures. There is no consideration of physical measures while analyzing and accepting a technique for a particular project. Nowadays customers satisfaction is also gaining great importance so customer perspective should also be taken into account. We have performed deep literature review and noted that analysis and selection of Requirements Engineering technique should consider all relevant attributes of each techniques and their mapping with project, people or other factors. There is a need to thoroughly comprehend and evaluate all the existing techniques with respect to analyst preferences, client experiences, project attributes, software process model characteristics. To do so, fuzzy clustering method is implemented in MATLAB. The key emphasis of this paper is to study and list all possible Requirements Engineering techniques related to Elicitation, Prioritization, Documentation, Verification and Validation, etc. The research work also analyzes attributes of each RE technique using Fuzzy C mean clustering and K mean clustering methods. The results of clustering provide a set of techniques, from which requirements engineer can select for specific phase of Requirements Engineering. The substantiation of the research work is done with the help of a case study that is having some known problem domain characteristics

ARES: An Agile Requirements Specification Process for Regulated Environments

Agile methods have provided significant contributions to Software Engineering. This work presents a new process for Software Requirements Specification, integrating Agile Properties and regulated environments, such as aviation, medical, nuclear and automotive, among others. The Software in Regulated Environments (SRE) involves plan-driven methods with needed documentation to ensure safety, reliability, security, and discipline. This paper proposes a balance between agile and plan-driven methods. We define a new process, which explores and investigates the usage of agile methods in SRE. The scope of this paper is Requirements Engineering, which is considered as a set of activities involved in the management, elicitation, documentation, and maintenance of requirements. The Adile Requirements Specification (ARES) process contains four methods, 13 activities, and some required artifacts to ensure compliance with the following six relevant Software Standards for regulated environments: RTCA DO-178C, IEC 62304:2015, ECSS-E-ST-40C, IEC 61508-3, ISO/IEC/IEEE 12207, and IAEA SSG-39. The process evaluation was performed using two experiments: a Cockpit Display System (CDS) and a Healthcare Information System (HIS). These experiments were measured with appropriate metrics to ensure improvements in Software Requirements Specification and traceability among artifacts. The experimental results revealed that the ARES process works better than the original Scrum for Software in Regulated Environments. The ARES process can also be integrated with traditional software life cycles (Waterfall, V, and Incremental and Iterative), when applied in the Requirements Engineering phase.