Requirements Artifacts Research Articles

Bridging the gap between requirements and design: An approach based on Problem Frames and SysML

The relation between the requirements specification and the design has been widely investigated with the aim to bridge the gap between the two artifacts. The goal is to find effective mechanisms to generate the system design starting from the analysis and specification of the requirements.This paper contributes to this research stream with an approach to create early design models from requirement artifacts. The approach weaves together the analysis and design phases favoring a tight collaboration between analysts and designers. It is based on Problem Frames, decomposition and re-composition patterns and supported by the System Modeling Language. The proposed solution has the potentiality of easing the development, shortening the development cycle and reducing the associated cost.The proposed design generation guidelines have been implemented as ATLAS Transformation Language rules in a model-based transformation process. The entire approach is model driven, allowing for the generation of the design model through transformations applied to the requirements model. The design model is automatically generated through the application of the transformation rules described in the paper. The proposed rules are fairly general and can be applied to any analysis model built according to the proposed analysis guidelines. The transformation process can be easily re-implemented using any suitable modeling tool that includes the ATLAS Transformation Language interpretation engine.

Resolving Semantic Heterogeneity in Multiperspective Requirements Traceability Using Ontology Matching

In largescaled software development projects, different stakeholders may deal with different pieces of software requirements depending on their perspectives or perceptions of their shared problems. Each of the users may define his/her requirements from his/her own point of view using different terminologies. System analysts may express or model the artifacts of the system by using different representation styles and methodologies. However, a group of stakeholders often needs to interact, collaborate or trace requirements among the group in order to achieve common goals in their development process. To resolve the semantic heterogeneity problems arising from requirements tracing among various stakeholders, the enhancement of multiperspective requirements traceability (MUPRET) framework is proposed. The main objective of this paper is to concentrate on tracing multiperspective requirements artifacts represented in the form of the textual requirements and the requirements model, specifically the entity relationship diagram. The requirements ontology is used as a knowledge representation to represent multiperspective requirements artifacts of an individual stakeholder. Ontology matching is applied as a reasoning mechanism in automatically generating traceability relationships without restricting the freedom in expressing requirements differently.

Application of swarm techniques to requirements tracing

We posit that swarm intelligence can be applied to effectively address requirements engineering problems. Specifically, this paper demonstrates the applicability of swarm intelligence to the requirements tracing problem using two techniques: a simple swarm algorithm and a pheromone swarm algorithm. The techniques have been validated using two real-world datasets from two problem domains. The simple swarm technique generated requirements traceability matrices between textual requirements artifacts (high-level requirements traced to low-level requirements, for example). When compared with a baseline information retrieval tracing method, the swarm algorithms showed mixed results. The swarms achieved statistically significantly results on one of the secondary measurements for one dataset compared with the baseline method, lending support for continued investigation into swarms for tracing.

Evaluating requirements modeling methods based on user perceptions: A family of experiments

Numerous methods and techniques have been proposed for requirements modeling, although very few have had widespread use in practice. One drawback of requirements modeling methods is that they lack proper empirical evaluations. This means that there is a need for evaluation methods that consider both the theoretical and practical aspects of this type of methods and techniques. In this paper, we present a method for evaluating the quality of requirements modeling methods based on user perceptions. The evaluation method consists of a theoretical model that explains the relevant dimensions of quality for requirements modeling methods, along with a practical instrument with which to measure these quality dimensions. Basically, it allows us to predict the acceptance of a particular requirements modeling method in practice, based on the effort of applying the method, the quality of the requirements artifacts produced, and the user perceptions with regard to the quality of the method. The paper also presents an empirical test of the proposed method for evaluating a Rational Unified Process (RUP) extension for requirements modeling. That test was carried out through a family of experiments conducted with students and practitioners and provides evidence of the usefulness of the evaluation method proposed.

The Processing of Pictures and Written Words: A Perceptual and Conceptual Perspective

The present study examines similarities and differences in the processing of drawings and their corresponding names. For this purpose, students were asked to determine as fast as possible the identicalness of two pictures as opposed to the identicalness of their written Hebrew names. Twenty-eight Hebrew native speakers from the fifth grade participated in the experiment. Findings suggest that the human information processing system optimizes the processing of information (words, drawings, etc.) according to specific task requirements or task constraints. Stimulus type per se does not seem to determine the depth of its processing, nor does it seem to directly trigger particular modalities of encoding (perceptual, linguistic, semantic). Finally, the findings warrant the conclusion that superiority effects related to the processing of written words and pictorial stimuli reflect artifacts of task requirements rather than inherent characteristics of stimuli.

Aspect Oriented Requirements Engineering

Requirements engineering techniques that explicitly recognize the importance of clearly identifying and treating crosscutting concerns are called Aspect-oriented Requirements Engineering Approaches (AORE approaches). The emergence of aspect-oriented programming languages has raised the explicit need to identify crosscutting concerns already during the analysis phase. Besides this observation, the modular representation of crosscutting requirements is a first step to ensure traceability of crosscutting concerns through all other artifacts of the software lifecycle (architecture, design and implementation).Aspect-oriented requirements engineering approaches improve existing requirements engineering approaches through an explicit representation (and modularization) of concerns that were otherwise spread throughout other requirements artifacts (such as use cases, goal models, viewpoints, etc.).AORE approaches adopt the principle of separation of concerns at the analysis phase (the early separation of concerns). In other words, AORE approaches provide a representation of crosscutting concerns in requirements artifacts.

Mining early aspects based on syntactical and dependency analyses

Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering focuses on the identification and modularisation of crosscutting concerns at early stages. There are different approaches in the requirements engineering community to deal with crosscutting concerns, introducing the benefits of the application of aspect-oriented approaches at these early stages of development. However, most of these approaches rely on the use of Natural Language Processing techniques for aspect identification in textual documents and thus, they lack a unified process that generalises its application to other requirements artefacts such as use case diagrams or viewpoints. In this paper, we propose a process for mining early aspects, i.e. identifying crosscutting concerns at the requirements level. This process is based on a crosscutting pattern where two different domains are related. These two different domains may represent different artefacts of the requirements analysis such as text and use cases or concerns and use cases. The process uses syntactical and dependency based analyses to automatically identify crosscutting concerns at the requirements level. Validation of the process is illustrated by applying it to several systems and showing a comparison with other early aspects tools. A set of aspect-oriented metrics is also used to show this validation.

Usage of social and semantic web technologies to design a searching architecture for software requirement artefacts

At present, the research community recognises a complementary relationship between the semantic and the social web. The merging of these web instances could play an essential role in different knowledge domains. In this study, the authors promote a social–semantic web paradigm using software engineering as the knowledge domain specifically. The authors address a major problem – the difficulty for end-users in finding documentation related to software requirements proposed by them; this fact reduces their participation at the time of specifying the software requirements. Architecture is proposed for enhanced resources search, combining the strengths of the social (social annotations) and semantic (semantic metadata) technologies, which has been designed considering the search style of the information seekers. Such architecture is applied in a use-scenario, where the expert users who are not technicians have some restrictions and limitations to retrieve the documents they need. The preliminary results demonstrate that it is possible to take advantage of the defined infrastructure of the ontology to organise and integrate the metadata of resources which are in databases or existent files; this approach opens several possibilities as creation and validation of software requirements collaboratively among different expert-users.

Refactoring to Requirements Documents: An approach Aspect Oriented

Typical problems of a requirements document, regarding its contents and organization, involve deficient modularization where requirements artifacts may deal with too much information, duplication of requirements, scattering requirements, tangled problems, among other problems. In this paper we describe how to improve requirements documents by removing duplication of information using aspect-oriented refactoring.

Multi-level feature trees

Feature modeling has become a popular technique for domain analysis and variability management. However, it is still a considerable challenge to apply this technique to product families and organizational contexts of high complexity like the product range of a global automotive corporation. Managing everything as a single product family with a global feature tree is virtually impossible owing to the enormous complexity, but if the product range is split up into several smaller, independent product lines with separate feature models, systematic reuse and strategic variability management across these portions is lost. In this article, we present multi-level feature trees, which offer a compromise between a single global and several smaller, independent feature trees. Other development artifacts may also be arranged in this way if the multi-level concept is adapted to them. This is shown exemplarily for requirements artifacts in Telelogic Doors. Finally, we describe scenarios showing how this concept can be put into practice.