Stages Of Requirements Engineering Research Articles

Requirement engineering problems impacting the quality of software in Sub-Saharan Africa

Poor software quality has led to tremendous financial losses, necessitating the goal of this study. This study aimed to find out the major cause of poor quality of software and propose solutions to mitigate the problem. Histogram analysis was conducted using data from software development firms’ online applications used to track all defects and issues for each project, which are logged under a unique project ID. The requirement engineering stage was found to produce the most problems that directly or indirectly impact software quality. The capability maturity model integration, prototyping, ISO 9001, Walkthroughs, and Formal Inspections were proposed as solutions that could be used to mitigate the software quality problems that arise from the requirement engineering stage in the software development life cycle.

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

Towards Developing Security Requirements Modeling for Outsourcing Software Projects

One of the most important aspects in achieving secure software systems in the software development process is security requirements engineering. It is crucial to take security concerns in the beginning of the development process. Outsourcing is a phrase used to describe the practice of seeking resources or subcontracting specific task to outside. Currently, project managers particularly in Malaysian Public Sector are facing challenges in security requirements. Project managers need a proper security modeling as a guideline to ensure the requirements meet. Hence, there is a need to study on security requirements modeling since it had become a crucial requirements since software is vulnerable to various attack. This paper proposes a study which focuses on the security requirement modeling in outsourcing software project in Malaysian Public Sector. We believe that security; privacy and trust requirements must be well collected, analyzed and specified through various stages of Requirements Engineering (RE) itself.

Design of Secure and Traceable Requirement Engineering Process for Security-Sensitive Projects

With continuous evolution in software industry, security is becoming very important in software projects. However, in many development methodologies, security is thought to be added in the project at later stages of the development lifecycle. There are also many proposed methodologies where the security measures are considered at requirement engineering stage of the development lifecycle, but many of them still do not seem adequate for applicability due to the reason that these approaches do not provide sufficient support for mapping the security requirements to the later stages of development. So, we are in need of a software requirement engineering approach, which is not only helpful in security requirement specification at requirement engineering stage but also provides support for using the specified security requirements at later stages of development. To meet this requirement, we introduce a new method Secure and Traceable Requirement Engineering Process (STREP). This method also helps the non-security-expert requirement engineers to specify requirements in such a way that the specified requirements can be used to derive security related test cases. STREP method not only deals with security issues of the system at requirement engineering stage, but also makes the security requirements more traceable to be used at later stages of development lifecycle, and as a result, secure systems are produced that are also usable as the customer wishes.

Effectiveness and performance analysis of model-oriented security requirements engineering to elicit security requirements: a systematic solution for developing secure software systems

Software systems are becoming more and more critical in every domain of human society. These systems are used not only by corporates and governments, but also by individuals and across networks of organizations. The wide use of software systems has resulted in the need to contain a large amount of critical information and processes, which certainly need to remain secure. As a consequence, it is important to ensure that the systems are secure by considering security requirements at the early phases of software development life cycle. In this paper, we propose to consider security requirements as functional requirements and apply model-oriented security requirements engineering framework as a systematic solution to elicit security requirements for e-governance software systems. As the result, high level of security can be achieved by more coverage of assets and threats, and identifying more traces of vulnerabilities in the early stages of requirements engineering. This in turn will help to elicit effective security requirements as countermeasures with business requirements.

Requirement Engineering Errors: Errors and Ambiguities of Visualization

Engineering encompasses the tasks that go into identifying, determining and understanding the customer needs as well as the expectations from the proposed software system or an application, taking account of possibly conflicting requirements of various stakeholders. Engineering, also referred to by names like requirement gathering or requirement analysis or requirement specification, is a well-defined stage in the software development life cycle. This stage is not only well defined but also very crucial to the success of software development. Most of the project failures have been attributed to this stage only. Its a general and very often heard statement: were not clear or Requirements were ambiguous. So, what does this word Requirement is all about, those requirement analysts try to establish and still, most of the projects fail due to lack of clarity in requirements. Requirements describe the behavior of the proposed software system but the roots of the same lie in the original real-time system for which software system has been proposed. Requirements engineering, in this manner, encompasses both the problem domain of the system as well as the solution domain of the system. The process of establishing the requirements is not an easy task as it is crossing over the boundaries of problem and the solution domain on a regular basis, and is bound to have errors. Errors in requirement engineering stage have many sources, ambiguous and unclear requirements are only a part of the problem. Having explored a number of common types of errors to find their source and strategies for dealing with them, Kurt Bittner (1) categorized requirement errors into three major groups: Errors of conceptualization (the ones that arise because of poorly conceived problem); Errors of specification (the ones that arise because of poor specification) and Error of implementation (the ones that arise because of poor coding and testing). This paper is an attempt to put forward an idea of one more category of requirement errors: Errors of visualization. The difference between errors of conceptualization and error of visualization though apparently seems vague but is as clear as the boundaries between problem and the solution domain. The paper attempts to study the differences between these two types of errors and also studies the symptoms and possible solution strategies for errors of visualization.

Ontology-based representation of reusable security requirements for developing secure web applications

Security is the major issue in web applications and it should be carefully considered in all the phases of the software development life cycle. The security requirements should be elicited and analysed in the early stages of requirements engineering. They are elicited from different sources by using security requirements engineering methods. Ontology can be used as one of the sources to specify security requirements knowledge effectively, since it is a 'formal, explicit specification of shared concepts' and is reusable. But there are no standard or only primitive security requirements ontology is available for requirements engineering phase. In this paper, we proposed and created security requirements ontology for web applications. Hence, we can reuse the security requirements knowledge and specify security requirements for developing different web applications. The reusability and effectiveness of security requirements ontology are validated using querying method.

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.

REUBI: A Requirements Engineering method for ubiquitous systems

Recent technological advances are increasing the spread of Ubiquitous Computing, leading to the appearance of numerous software systems, which benefit from the features of this new paradigm. Nevertheless, there are a lack of methodologies to properly support the development process of these systems. An important part of the Software Engineering lifecycle is the Requirements Engineering stage, as it grounds the bases for system design for their success. In particular, systematically addressing Non-Functional Requirements such as dynamicity and adaptation, that are important features of ubiquitous systems, eventually leads to higher quality designs. In this paper, a Requirements Engineering Method for the analysis of Ubiquitous Systems, called REUBI, is introduced. It is a goal-based method that represents the influence of context and adverse situations, providing an evaluation procedure to help in the decision making about objectives satisfaction. The proposal is illustrated through the analysis of a Positioning Service of a real system. Additionally, the application of the method has been evaluated by a team of software engineers for the analysis of an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) health care system.

Towards an Ontological Approach to Information System Security and Safety Requirement Modeling and Reuse

ABSTRACT Misuse cases are currently used to identify safety and security threats and subsequently capture safety and security requirements. There is limited consensus to the precise meaning of the basic terminology used for use/misuse case concepts. This paper delves into the use of ontology for the formal representation of the use-misuse case domain knowledge for eliciting safety and security requirements. We classify misuse cases into different category to reflect different type of misusers. This will allow participants during the requirement engineering stage to have a common understanding of the problem domain. We enhanced the misuse case domain to include abusive misuse case and vulnerable use case in order to boost the elicitation of safety requirements. The proposed ontological approach will allow developer to share and reuse the knowledge represented in the ontology thereby avoiding ambiguity and inconsistency in capturing safety and security requirements. OWL protégé 3.3.1 editor was used for the ontology coding. An illustration of the use of the ontology is given with examples from the health care information system.