Requirement Engineering Phase Research Articles

An Investigation of Prototyping Technique in Pakistani Software Industry

Requirements elicitation is one of the important and major activities within the Requirements Engineering phase. There are different techniques used for requirement elicitation process. Selection of any requirements elicitation technique depends on complexity, size, time and other resources of proposed software project. Selection of suitable technique for requirements elicitation is not a trivial process and if it is done properly then it can reduce time, budget, and risk constraints of system being developed. Sometimes researchers have found a gap between theory and practice that is gap between literature and industry practices. Therefore, goal of this paper is to find out the gap between literature and industry practice about requirements elicitation practices in PSI (Pakistani Software Industry). This paper shows the usage and impact of prototyping technique of requirements elicitation on product quality in Pakistani software companies. 29 Software companies following prototyping technique practice were surveyed using questionnaire, to investigate about usage of prototyping technique of requirements elicitation in industry, and impact of prototyping technique of requirements elicitation on product quality in term of schedule, cost and the customer Satisfaction. The appropriate practice of prototyping technique of requirements elicitation can reduce the project failure rate in PSI.

Requirements Elicitation Technique Selection: A Five Factors Approach

Requirements Engineering phase is well recognized as a root of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) by research community. Requirements are elucidated through requirements elicitation methods conceded by requirement analyst. Requirements elicitation phase is planned and strategized to get complete acquaintance about user’s requirements and expectations. Current software industries having massive necessity to help requirements analyst in requirements elicitation process to carry out precise manner. Correct and refined requirements lead to successful software projects. Vague and incorrect requirements possibly will result in the defective software project. For successful software development, it is vital to recognize precise and accurate requirements for the software project. The progression of information technology has presented various requirements elicitation techniques and therefore analysts are provided with various likely options. Generally, the analyst selects elicitation technique according to company practice or their individual knowledge and skills. It is undefined on the selection of best elicitation techniques for certain situations under particular constraints and circumstances. Several guidelines do exist in literature for technique selection but most technique are theoretical rather than practical. In this research paper, deep knowledge of principal elicitation techniques is explained. After that a five facets model is proposed to select elicitation technique in which major aspects are project characteristics, software development process categories, organizational characteristics, stakeholder characteristics and analyst characteristics. We also demonstrate the suitability of the proposed framework via case studies and verified how the model uses relative knowledge of problem domain to select appropriate requirements elicitation technique for the software under construction.

An Early Multi-Criteria Risk Assessment Model

Accurate time and budget is an essential estimate for planning software projects correctly. Quite often, the software projects fall into unrealistic estimates and the core reason generally owes to problems with the requirement analysis. For investigating such problems, risk has to identified and assessed at the requirement engineering phase only so that defects do not seep down to other software development phases. This article proposes a multi-criteria risk assessment model to compute risk at a requirement level by computing cumulative risk score based on a weighted score assigned to each criterion. The result of comparison with other approaches and experimentation shows that using this model it is possible to predict the risk at the early phase of software development life cycle with high accuracy.

Towards Risk Based Effort Estimation

Studies have shown that requirement defects are among the major sources of failure constituting 32.65%. It is one of the overlooked aspects in requirements engineering and is generally considered as a potential problem that can affect the projects in a negative way. The main objective of this article is to propose a risk-based effort estimation technique that identifies, analyzes, and classifies risk at requirement engineering phase to restrain them from propagating to the later stages of the project lifecycle. This article extends the scope by integrating both threats and opportunities and their further classification based on extensive requirement analysis. The validation of the proposed approach was conducted on successfully delivered real project data. A survey is also conducted as a part of qualitative analysis for analyzing the applicability of the proposed approach. The results of the proposed method are promising and strongly support findings of literature stating that the effort needed to fix issues at a later stage in project lifecycle are costly as compared to early stages.

Requirement Elicitation Model (REM) in the Context of Global Software Development

<p>Requirement elicitation is difficult and critical phase of requirement engineering and the case is worst in global software development (GSD). The study is about requirement elicitation in the context of GSD. Development of requirement elicitation model (REM) which can address the factors that have positive impact and the factors that have negative impact during elicitation in GSD. The propose model will give solutions and practices to the challenges during elicitation. Systematic literature review (SLR) and empirical research study will be used for achieving the goals and objectives. The expected results of this study will be REM that will help vendor organizations for better elicitation during GSD.</p>

Security Testing Framework for Web Applications

The growth of web-based applications has increased tremendously from last two decades. While these applications bring huge benefits to society, yet they suffer from various security threats. Although there exist various techniques to ensure the security of web applications, still a large number of applications suffer from a wide variety of attacks and result in financial loses. In this article, a security-testing framework for web applications is proposed with an argument that security of an application should be tested at every stage of software development life cycle (SDLC). Security testing is initiated from the requirement engineering phase using a keyword-analysis phase. The output of the first phase serves as input to the next phase. Different case study applications indicate that the framework assists in early detection of security threats and applying appropriate security measures. The results obtained from the implementation of the proposed framework demonstrated a high detection ratio with a less false-positive rate.

Requirements Engineering Techniques for Data Warehouse using Information Packaging Methodology

A requirement is a feature of the system or a description of something the system is capable of doing in order to fulfill the system's purpose. Building a data warehouse is a very challenging task. Most of the data ware house project fails to meet the business requirements and business goals because of the improper requirement engineering phase. The Requirement Engineering (RE) is the most important phase of the software development life cycle (SDLC). This phase results into a large document written in natural language that converts the incomplete, imprecise requirements and wishes of the potential users into complete, precise and formal specifications. This formal specification is known as SRS i.e. Software Requirement Specification. These Requirements are transformed into information package in the form of dimensions, hierarchies and facts to build a data warehouse. Hospital can be seen as an example of a complex system. This paper considers Hospital as a case study for which a software system has been developed taking the mentioned approach into account. In this paper we study information package for Hospital Automation System.

REASSURE: Requirements elicitation for adaptive socio-technical systems using repertory grid

ContextSocio-technical systems are expected to understand the dynamics of the execution environment and behave accordingly. Significant work has been done on formalizing and modeling requirements of such adaptive systems. However, not enough attention is paid on eliciting requirements from users and introducing flexibility in the system behavior at an early phase of requirements engineering. Most of the work is based on an assumption that general users’ cognitive level would be able to support the inherent complexity of variability acquisition. ObjectiveOur main focus is on providing help to the users with ordinary cognitive level to express their expectations from the complex system considering various contexts. This work also helps the designers to explore the design variability based on the general users’ preferences. MethodWe explore the idea of using a cognitive technique Repertory Grid (RG) to acquire knowledge from users and experts along multiple dimensions of problem and design space. We propose REASSURE methodology which guides requirements engineers to explore the intentional and design variability in an organized way. We also provide a tool support to analyze the knowledge captured in multiple repertory grid files and detect potential conflicts in the intentional variability. Finally, we evaluate the proposed idea by performing an empirical study using smart home system domain. ResultsThe result of our study shows that a greater number of requirements can be elicited after applying our approach. With the help of the provided tool support, it is even possible to detect a greater number of conflicts in user’s requirements than the traditional practices. ConclusionWe envision RG as a technique to filter design options based on the intentional variability in various contexts. The promising results of empirical study open up new research questions: “how to elicit requirements from multiple stakeholders and reach consensus for multi-dimensional problem domain”.

A FUZZY BASED APPROACH FOR EARLY REQUIREMENT PRIORITIZATION

The importance of the prioritization in commercial software development has been analyzed by many researchers. The gathered requirements are required to be put into an order of some priority. In other words we can say that there is a need to prioritize the requirements. It is evident that most of the approaches and techniques proposed in recent research to prioritize the requirements have not been widely adopted. These approaches are too complex, time consuming, or inconsistent and difficult to implement In this paper we propose a fuzzy based approach for requirement prioritization in which requirement are prioritized in early phase of requirement engineering as post elicitation step. This category of prioritization is known as early requirement prioritization. The proposed fuzzy based approach considers the nature of requirements by modeling their attributes as fuzzy variables. As such, these variables are integrated into a fuzzy based inference system in which the requirements represented as input attributes and ranked via the expected value operator of a fuzzy variable.

Classification of NFRs for Information System

Software requirements are broadly classified into two parts, i.e., functional requirements (FR) and non-functional requirements (NFRs). In recent year, NFRs have received much attention by requirements engineering community. This can be verified from the importance of the NFR framework. This framework was developed to elicit and model only the NFRs. There are different NFRs for different types of system like information system, web based system, real time system etc. Elicitation of NFRs for these types of systems is an important research issue. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to classify various NFRs for Information System so that requirements analyst can easily identify the complete list of NFRs according to their need in early phase of requirements engineering.

UML-based requirement modeling of Web online synchronous collaborative public participatory GIS

This paper focuses on object-oriented software engineering (OOSE)-based software development life cycle (SDLC) for requirement analysis, design, and development of a Web collaborative public participatory geographic information system (PPGIS) (Co-PPGIS) infrastructure. Despite its importance, requirement engineering phase remains a neglected area in the geographical information system (GIS)-based SDLC. The absence of research and standardized requirement engineering (RE) process is more noticeable in the case of PPGIS applications, which are employed during municipality management, municipality planning, quick response, etc. This paper intends to introduce and suggest an OOSE standard requirement capturing model for the development of Web online Co-PPGIS. Using the unified modeling language (UML) Web-based Engineering (UWE) framework as the baseline, techniques for requirement elicitation, tailored for specific needs of synchronous collaborative PPGIS, are presented. Moreover, the requirement-gathering techniques range from checklists to creating user personas; the Web-based PPGIS aspect is handled through categorization of functional and non-functional requirements, including that of Web content and map visualization. Future work includes incorporation of UML-based requirement analysis and requirement validation techniques to complete the model. It is hoped with this research and better understanding of techniques and available methodology that requirement engineering practices will become widespread and contribute in adoption of a standardized RE process life cycle for PPGIS applications. Also, it is hypothesized that the Co-PPGIS would help to increase the degree to which the citizen, local bodies, environmental assessment, government agencies, and decision authorities work at the same time by using the single platform but at different locations with a lower cost and more effective real-time collaborative communication channels, partially due to the adoption of real-time geo-collaborative groupware technologies and OOSE-based requirement capturing methodology for the development of Co-PPGIS mapsharing mechanism.

A Review of Requirement Engineering Issues and Challenges in Various Software Development Methods

Requirement Engineering (RE) is a systemic and integrated process of eliciting, elaborating, negotiating, prioritizing, specifying, validating and managing the requirements of a system. The detailed and agreed requirements are documented and specified to serve as the basis for further system development activities. The software industry has moved from traditional software development method to service oriented software development. While many researchers and practitioners have observed issues and challenges in Requirement Engineering phase specific to a software method, very little attention has been given to investigate diversity of issues and challenges of RE in different software development methods under one umbrella. This paper tries to review significant issues and challenges of RE from traditional software development method to recent service oriented software development method. The study unveils that there is a wide scope for developing new approaches and techniques in requirement engineering to resolve problems observed in various SE methods. The review discussion reveals the need of standardization and automation of RE process especially for Service oriented software development. KeywordsEngineering, RE phase, SE methods, traditional software development, service oriented software development, automation of RE

Visibility Requirements Engineering for Commercial Websites

Visibility in search engines is a competitive advantage of commercial websites. In this context, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques are devised to enhance the ranking of websites in search engine results. The existing approaches toward SEO are primarily modifying the content or the structure of websites during the post-development activities. These modifications can introduce new defects to the websites. To tackle this problem, we have proposed caring for visibility in the requirements of commercial websites. We further contribute a goal-based framework for modeling and description of visibility in requirement engineering phase. The framework lays a foundation for automated analysis of visibility in commercial websites.

Deriving Object-Oriented Taxonomy from the Requirement Engineering Model for a Non-Fading Data Warehouse

Building a data warehouse (DWH) is a very challenging task. Most of the DWH projects fail to meet the business requirements and business goals because of the improper requirement engineering phase. The gap in between the development of requirements evolves due to disparity between the users and the developers, resulting in project devastation and terminations. DWH quality depends on the quality of its requirement engineering models. Agent orientation is emerging as a unique paradigm in requirement engineering for constructing DWH and maintaining the non-fading DWH property. Agent-oriented systems are expected to be more powerful, more flexible and more robust than conventional requirement elicitation models. The CAGDI stands for clustered agent-oriented decision information model, which has benefits over the agent goal decision information (AGDI) model and overcomes the short comings of the AGDI model. The model can be used in the early as well as in the late requirement elicitation. Object-oriented modelling is an important technique for database design because it organises system as a collection of interacting objects that combine data and behaviour. In this paper, the CAGDI model has been illustrated though the application of a banking system and at the end of the paper, the CAGDI model is given in the object-oriented paradigm in which the Unified Modelling Language UML diagrams, such as activity diagrams and sequential diagrams, have been discussed to prove the concept.

An Agent Oriented Approach of Requirement Engineering in Developing a Data Ware Houses for Banking System

of the data ware house project fails to meet the business requirements and business goals because of the improper requirement engineering phase. The chaos all through the development of requirements evolves due to disparity between users and developers resulting in project devastations and terminations. Building a data warehouse is a very challenging task. Data warehouse quality depends on the quality of its requirement engineering models. Agent orientation is emerging as a unique paradigm for constructing Data ware house. Agent oriented systems are expected to be more powerful, more flexible, and more robust than conventional software systems. In this paper the detail discussion of agent oriented methodology used in early as well as late requirement elicitation. The proposed approach is illustrated through an case study of the general banking system for which Data Ware house is to be built to support decisional goals.

A New Hybrid Model of Requirement Engineering for a Non-Fading Data Warehouse with Evaluation

Building a data warehouse (DWH) is a very challenging task. Most of the DWH project fails to meet the business requirements and business goals because of the improper requirement engineering phase. The gap in between the development of requirements evolves due to disparity between users and developers resulting in project devastation and terminations. DWH quality depends on the quality of its requirement engineering models. Agent orientation is emerging as a unique paradigm in requirement engineering for constructing DWH and maintaining the non-fading DWH property. Agent-oriented systems are expected to be more powerful, more flexible and more robust than conventional requirement elicitation models. In this paper, a new conceptual model CAGDI stand for Clustered Agent-Oriented Decision Information Model has been proposed, which has benefits over the Agent Goal Decision Information (AGDI) model and overcome the short comings of AGDI model. The model can be used in early as well as in late requirement elicitation. This model has been illustrated though an application of a banking system. At the end of the paper the proposed model is evaluated by the requirement metrics.

Autonomic Computing: A Framework to Identify Autonomy Requirements

Computing systems are ever growing in complexity. With that growth, the challenge of operating and maintaining them increased. In certain conditions, these systems may exist in harsh and distant environments making such operations even more difficult. To address the previous issues, the concept of autonomic computing originated. This concept, when applied fully will result in machines capable of evolving and managing themselves. This research aims to develop a framework for software engineers to apply autonomy in their Software Requirement Engineering phase by answering the question “What aspects affect the definition of autonomy requirements?”. The findings shall ease the understanding of the complex problem of capturing Adaptive requirements. This paper will present a proposed Requirements Engineering framework for Autonomic systems, in addition to some examples of systems applying autonomy.

Shortening Requirements Engineering: Dual Imperative Action Research Study

A computer parts company was losing market share because the systems development life cycle (SDLC) took too long. We reduce the requirements engineering (RE) phase of the SDLC while maintaining current levels of product quality and increasing the company competitiveness by reducing the product time-to-market. Action research, a practical and widely used method of inquiry, was used to solve the problem. There are five types of action research (canonical, dialogical, collaborative, dual imperative, and participatory), but dual imperative action research seemed most appropriate for our study. The problem solving approach used in the study combined joint application design (JAD), unified modeling language (UML), group decision support systems (GDSS), and computer aided software engineering (CASE). We successfully reduced the SDLC time from fourteen to four days, a productivity increase of 250%.

Title: Security in Requirement Engineering for Qualitative Products

li f e cycle. In our research we have proposed a m od el “integration of security with functional r e qu i r eme n t s model”. By using this model the security i ssu e s defined at the requirement engineering phase and it has followed in the next stages of the SDLC, We h a d proved our results by checking the efficiency of t h e architecture after applying the proposed model on a payment sys tem .

Understanding Requirement Engineering for Context-Aware Service-Based Applications

Requirements of software systems tend to change over time. The speed of this tendency depends on the application domain the software system under consideration belongs to. If we consider novel contexts such as pervasive systems and systems supporting dynamic B2B interaction, requirements change so fast that the research community is studying how to build systems that are able to self-adapt on the fly to some of these changes. When this happens, the system does not need to undergo through a new development cycle thus increasing its availability and, to a certain extent, its robustness. So far, the research in the area of self-adaptive systems has been focusing on the definition of the mechanisms for supporting self-adaptation. We argue that what is missing now is a structured and robust design process associated to these mechanisms. This design process should include a Requirement Engineering (RE) phase that somewhat differs from the traditional one. However, the identification of requirements for adaptation requires a good knowledge of the context in which the system will be executed. In this work, we consider the modeling of such context as part of the RE phase and we particularly focus on Service-Based Applications (SBAs). We argue that RE activities should be supported at run-time to handle context changes and to support adaptation for SBAs. We survey the state of the art for what concerns the elicitation, modeling, and analysis of requirements and will highlight some issues and challenges in order to support adaptation for SBAs.