Reusable Requirements Research Articles

Studies on the Ontology-Based Composable Modeling Technology of Radar Countermeasure Test Simulation

Aiming to realistic requirement to reusability and composability of radar countermeasure test simulation and modeling, the ontology construction method has been proposed by analyzing the influence of ontology in terms of knowledge management and formal description. The design of ontology-based component library and the solutions of composable modeling have been discussed, and the effectiveness has been validated by examples that the methods can satisfy the requirements of model reusability and simulation compos-ability in the field of radar countermeasure test simulation and modeling.

Identified adjustability dimensions when generating a product specific requirements specification by requirements reuse

A requirements reuse setups typically includes reusable requirement set(s) containing a collection of reusable requirements and a number of product specific requirements sets which are drawn from the reusable set(s). The ideal scenario when reusing requirements is that all the product requirements can be drawn directly from the reusable set. However, this is rarely the case in product development as new requirements are likely to surface. A critical issue in requirements reuse therefore becomes how to enable products to efficiently reuse requirements as well incorporating changes to the product set. In this paper the objective is not to present a specific method for requirements reuse but to introduce and discuss the possible dimensions of adjustability when generating a product requirement set by reusing requirements from a reusable set. Six adjustability dimensions have been identified. An extensive state of the art is included to introduce the presented methods related to each adjustability dimensions. The options for implementing each adjustability dimensions in a requirement reuse approach are illustrated along with a discussion regarding the benefits and issues resulting from each option. This discussion should help practitioners to better understand the possible methods that can be implemented and to design a user friendly and sustainable approach. A case study, describing how the dimensions are incorporated in two requirements reuse approaches, for Danfoss Solar Inverters (SI) and Danfoss Frequency Drives is provided. As a result an overview of how each adjustability dimensions is implemented in each case is presented. The case study demonstrates that all the identified adjustability dimensions were important elements in requirements reuse implementation. The case study furthermore highlights the need, not only to understand the effects of each adjustability dimension but also of the dependencies to case specific criterions. The classification of adjustability dimensions in requirements reuse and the options for their implementation has not been outlined by previous research and should be a useful contribution both to researchers and practitioners working in the field of requirements reuse.

Service-oriented framework for building reusable decision processes – in the domain of ITSM

With the growing impact of IT-Systems for the success of a company, the IT Service Management ITSM gets an important domain. ITSM is a management system for the IT-services of an organization, which will be described by different models. The models offer standardization and reusability of processes and methods, but there exists no decision support for the deciders. Therefore a Decision Support System DSS has to be built, which addresses this issue and fulfills the requirements of standardization and reusability, like the models of the ITSM. This article describes a service-oriented framework for building reusable decision processes and a possible usage in the domain of ITSM. The framework is based on a standardized decision process and allows reusability through service orientation. Each component of the framework offers services in a service-catalog, which can be used by other components. This allows the shifting from problem oriented DSS to more generic DSS, where decision-processes of different domain can be supported and reused.

Software Reuse Facilitated by the Underlying Requirement Specification Document: A Knowledge-Based Approach

Reinventing the wheel may not be appropriate in all instances of software development, and so, rather than do this, reuse of software artifacts should be embraced. Reuse offers certain benefits which include reduction in the overall development costs, increased reliability, standards compliance, accelerated development and reduced process risk. However, reusable software artifacts may not be considered useful if they cannot be accessed and understood. In this work, a knowledge based system was designed to capture requirements specification documents as abstract artifacts to be reused. Both explicit and tacit knowledge identification and acquisition- an important step in knowledge base development, was carried out through extraction from customer requirement documents, interviews with domain experts and personal observations. Protege4.1 was used as a tool for developing the Ontology. Web Ontology Language (OWL) was the search mechanism used to search the classified ontology to deduce reusable requirement components based on the underlying production rules for querying and retrieval of artifacts. Knowledge was formalized and result testing was carried out using software requirement specification documents from different domains. Result shows that only requirements with similar object properties called system purpose could really reuse such artifacts. The possibility of accessing more reusable artifacts lies in the update of the repository with more requirement specification documents. Scopes and purposes of previously developed software that would suit a proposed system in the same (or similar) domain would be found and consequently support the reuse of any of the end-products of such previously developed software.

Proposed Ontology for Requirements Reuse

Requirements engineering is a crucial phase in system development. If the requirements are correct, the entire project will succeed but the failure of requirements will have negative impact on the project. In this research, ontology for requirement reuse is proposed either across different projects or within a single project. The requirements once elicited, designed, verified and validated, produce sets of artefacts that are used to build the system. These requirements can be useful if stored in a repository and searched for similar criteria in future scenario thus, saving time and effort. This paper proposes ontology for the reuse process of the requirements.

Reuse of requirements reduced time to market at one industrial shop: a case study

Many a computer-based system (CBS) developed in one division of the Israel Aerospace Industries, is a derivation of formerly delivered CBSs. Sometimes, a CBS that was developed over decades needs to be redesigned for a new customer or for new technology. In addition, the requirements management process in the division has to deal with an extensive system of systems, a matrix organizational structure, and many subcontractors in order to develop any fully operational CBS. It has become obvious that any generic building block in any product developed by any project in a project family stands a chance to be reused to build new products in other projects of the same project family. Moreover, this reuse is best if it begins with the consideration of the reuse of a requirements specification of the building block, in order to save the time and money of the block's development. The reused artifact can be the contract description of the building block, from very early in the lifecycle. Alternatively, the reused artifact can be detailed hardware and software specifications for the building block, from later in the lifecycle. With which specification reuse begins depends on the purpose of the reuse. No matter when a reuse began, it led to some significant reduction in the product's time to market, i.e., its time to delivery. This paper is a case study of several instances in an industrial setting of building-block reuse within a large-scale system being developed in the division. It reports how these reuses were discovered and carried out. Among the contributions of this paper is a description of the division's multilevel requirements hierarchy that is based on the multilevel architecture of the CBS to be developed. Also contributed the division's idea of project-family-based reuse, as opposed to product-line-based reuse. The paper shows how basing reuse on a project family made proactive reuse possible. The paper then analyzes data from the division's requirements-management tool about these reuses to assess the impact of requirements reuse on time to market. Finally, it confirms this quantitative assessment by a qualitative assessment garnered from quotations gathered from interviews of four key people two-and-a-half years after the end of the period of the case study.

Identification of a reusable requirements structure for embedded products in a dynamic market environment

A technical product can have hundreds of requirements, resulting in a resource consuming requirement processes. Requirements are therefore becoming a valuable knowledge. Requirement reuse has been recognized as a promising enabler to increase efficiency and quality of the requirement processes. Before documenting and reusing requirements there must be a defined way of organizing them. An efficient comprehension of the context of the requirement structure will support the usage of the structure and thus reuse of existing requirements. To understand what makes a structure qualified for requirement reuse; criterions for a good requirement structure were identified. A survey of current requirement structuring techniques revealed that the current methods only fulfil some but not all of the criterions. A proposal of a structure for a reusable requirement specification has been presented. It suggests a new way of grouping requirements and also utilizes techniques presented in some of the existing modelling methods. The proposal was applied to a product development project of Solar Inverters. The case study revealed that the proposed structure was well accepted by its users, remained stable between projects and supported reuse.

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.

A Model for Reusing Requirements Using Examples from Open Source Software

The quality of requirements is one of the key factors in the success of a project. One of the studies on successful projects is the reuse of requirements. However, the rate of failed projects is about 70%, and these projects often fail because of improper requirements. The current techniques for software reuse may not perform requirement engineering appropriately or develop requirements having good characteristics. In order to improve this situation, we propose a model for reusing requirements. We expect that our model will contribute toward increasing project productivity using requirement reuse in existing projects, and reusing requirements that have good quality.

3.6.2 Next Generation Requirements Engineering

AbstractEstablishing and managing a “good” set of requirements is one of the critical success factors for any space system project, and for the development of any complex product in general. The NextGenRE project sponsored by the European Space Agency has developed an innovative approach featuring the use of semantic wiki technology to enable users to specify structured, semantically‐rich requirements associated with canonical system designs in OMG SysML. Reuse of requirements through templates is supported, as well as semantic reasoning to check properties such as consistency and coherence among requirements. The approach is entirely model‐based, allowing tight integration of the requirements engineering and design processes and opening the way to the application of model checking and simulation techniques. The new approach is being validated alongside an existing space project.

Design of a reference control architecture for the energy management of electric vehicles

The High-Voltage (HV) network within an Electric Vehicle (EV) will typically comprise different energy sources such as fuel cells, batteries and ultracapacitors integrated together through the use of both unidirectional and bidirectional DC-DC converters. Given the multitude of feasible HV network designs, there are obvious advantages in having a unifying control architecture that facilitates the Energy Management (EM) control task. Within this paper, a control Reference Architecture (RA) is proposed that can be employed as a template for the design of the EM control function. Example EM control systems are presented each derived from the same RA, but relating to a different physical configuration of HV network. Simulation results are presented to verify the functional performance of the control systems. In each case, the design trade-offs associated with the functional performance of the EM strategy and the non-functional requirements of modularity and reusability are discussed.

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.

Research on Component Retrieval Method Based on Faceted Classification Described

With the development of component technology and component library expansion, component representation and retrieval technology as the component library management two core technologies has become a research hotspot. According to the current widely used methods described and characteristics of components faceted classification, this paper starting from component reuse by different search methods，based on view search method、based on faceted search method、based on terms retrieval method three kinds of term component retrieval methods and the corresponding model of the five matches and two matching algorithms are proposed. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the three kinds of retrieval methods used in large-scale component library component retrieval, to meet the component reuse of various search requirements and the retrieval efficiency is feasible.

Engineering Requirements in Product Lines

AbstractNew product development is a usually a compromise between customer requirements, existing product architectural constraints and commercial needs. Many product innovations are cost‐effective extensions within a product line, and draw on a deep knowledge of existing processes, products or services. In this tutorial we describe how requirements for a product line can be modelled, selected and reused to engineer the requirements for innovative new products. Critical issues are the engineering of requirements commonality and variability across different products, the management of inter‐dependencies between reusable requirements during selection, the constraints placed upon these selections by existing architectures, and being able to manage each of these issues when the number of requirements is very large. We address these concerns, present results of using these techniques, and describe some software tools that can be used to support them.

Reuse of requirements in the context of product lines of a complex system

Abstractthis paper is about Product lines. A product line is the development of products that have commonalities. It is based on reusing engineering artifacts (requirements, architecture, tests…) and on managing variants of products. The development of a set of products rather than developing single products independently, which minimizes costs and completion time. This paper is about reusing a set of common requirements. It describes the different techniques for requirements reuse and a panorama of the different tools. It presents an implementation in DOORS.

BDD-Based Approach to the Verification of Feature Models

PDF HTML阅读 XML下载 导出引用 引用提醒 基于二分决策图的特征模型验证方法 DOI: 作者: 作者单位: 作者简介: 通讯作者: 中图分类号: 基金项目: Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos.60528006, 60703065, 60873059 (国家自然科学基金); the National High-Tech Research and Development Plan of China under Grant Nos.2006AA01Z156, 2007AA01Z123 (国家高技术研究发展计划(863)); the National Basic Research Program of China under Grant No.2005CB321805 (国家重点基础研究发展计划(973)) BDD-Based Approach to the Verification of Feature Models Author: Affiliation: Fund Project: 摘要 | 图/表 | 访问统计 | 参考文献 | 相似文献 | 引证文献 | 资源附件 | 文章评论 摘要:特征模型是领域分析活动产生的具有复用价值的软件需求模型.对特征模型的复用通常采用定制的方式.特征模型定制中的一个重要问题是验证问题.该问题的存在是因为特征之间往往具有一定的约束关系,而一个合法的定制结果必须保证特征之间所有约束关系的被满足性.由于特征模型验证问题NP-hard所具有的性质,如何高效地进行特征模型的验证就成为一件相对困难的事情.在深入挖掘特征模型验证问题特殊性的基础上,将这种特殊性和二分决策图的结构特点进行了有效的结合,提出了一种通过对二分决策图的一次遍历即能实现特征模型验证的方法.需要指出的是,该方法并非试图在一般意义上解决特征模型验证问题中NP-hard的困难性,而是尽可能地利用该问题的特殊性,以提高处理特征模型定制问题的规模和效率.实验数据表明,相比较以前采用的验证方法,基于BDD(binary decision diagram)的方法在处理特征模型验证问题的规模和效率上都具有显著的提高. Abstract:The feature model is a reusable requirements model generated from the domain analysis. The reuse of feature models is usually achieved by a customizing-based approach. One important issue in feature models’ customization is the verification problem, caused by the fact that there are usually constraints among features, and that a valid customizing result must satisfy all these constraints. Because of the NP-hard nature of this problem, it is usually difficult to verify feature models in an efficient way. This paper presents a BDD (binary decision diagram)-based approach to verifying feature models by only traversing once to the nodes in BDDs, an approach that makes an efficient use of the BDD data structures based on the unique characteristics of feature models’ verification. It should be pointed out that this approach does not attempt to resolve the NP-hard difficulty of the verification problem in a general sense, but just tries to improve the scalability and efficiency of methods for feature models’ verification based on the utilization of this problem’s uniqueness. Experimental results show that this BDD-based approach is more efficient and can verify more complex feature models than the previous method. 参考文献 相似文献 引证文献

Graph-based traceability: a comprehensive approach

In recent years, traceability has been globally accepted as being a key success factor of software development projects. However, the multitude of different, poorly integrated taxonomies, approaches and technologies impedes the application of traceability techniques in practice. This paper presents a comprehensive view on traceability, pertaining to the whole software development process. Based on the state of the art, the field is structured according to six specific activities related to traceability as follows: definition, recording, identification, maintenance, retrieval, and utilization. Using graph technology, a comprehensive and seamless approach for supporting these activities is derived, combining them in one single conceptual framework. This approach supports the definition of metamodels for traceability information, recording of traceability information in graph-based repositories, identification and maintenance of traceability relationships using transformations, as well as retrieval and utilization of traceability information using a graph query language. The approach presented here is applied in the context of the ReDSeeDS project (Requirements Driven Software Development System) that aims at requirements-based software reuse. ReDSeeDS makes use of traceability information to determine potentially reusable architectures, design, or code artifacts based on a given set of reusable requirements. The project provides case studies from different domains for the validation of the approach.

Authoring Systems Delivering Reusable Learning Objects

A three layer e-learning course development model has been defined based on a conceptual model of learning content object. It starts by decomposing the learning content into small chunks which are initially placed in a hierarchic structure of units and blocks. The raw content components, being the atomic learning objects (ALO), were linked to the blocks and are structured in the database. We set forward a dynamic generation of LO's using re-usable e-learning raw materials or ALOâ??s
 In that view we need a LO authoring/ assembling system fitting the requirements of interoperability and reusability and starting from selecting the raw learning content from the learning materials content database. In practice authoring systems are used to develop e-learning courses. The company EDUWEST has developed an authoring system that is database based and will be SCORM compliant in the near future.

Design, Realization and Evaluation of a Component-based, Compositional Network Simulation Environment

In this paper, we present a component-based network simulation environment that provides a systematic way to simulate, with high fidelity, protocol operations in a variety of target network architectures. We take a four-step approach to developing such a composable network simulation environment with reusable components. First, we lay a component-based software architecture, called the autonomous component architecture (ACA). Second, we propose a new real-time, process-driven simulation technique that fits naturally in ACA and simulates the real system realistically. Third, we devise a packet-based network simulation framework, called extensible internetworking framework (INET), on top of ACA. Fourth, we implement in Java both ACA and INET, and several representative suites of protocol components in a variety of network architectures. The resulting codes, along with a scripting framework, constitute a network simulation environment called J-Sim. By virtue of the many desirable features inherited from ACA, the J-Sim environment meets the flexibility, composability, reusability, extensibility and diagnosability requirements. The price J-Sim pays for the many desirable features is, however, the inter-component communication overhead. In this paper, we show (via experimentation) that this overhead is not significant (in the range of 0.2—0.6 μs), and J-Sim achieves better scalability than two other network simulators in the public domains, ns-2 and Scalable Simulation Framework Network Models (SSFNET), in terms of both the experiment setup time and the simulation completion time.

Using parameters and discriminants for product line requirements

AbstractReuse and Requirements Engineering are very important for efficient and successful product development. However, there are many open issues for performing them well in practice, especially reuse of requirements. This paper addresses several of these issues by making use of parameters and discriminants for product line requirements. Discriminants are a special kind of requirement that differentiate one product from another. They represent qualitative variability in a product line model, while parameters represent quantitative variability. In this paper these techniques are combined in the form of parameterized discriminants. Using the techniques and a metamodel for the representation of a product line model, a stakeholder‐viewpoint oriented process is defined for capturing product line requirements and constructing a product line model. From such a generic model and with well‐defined semantics, selecting single product application requirements can be done systematically, guaranteeing the property that the resulting single product satisfies the constraints of the product line model. Even for unsystematic free selection as often used in practice, it can be formally verified whether this property holds. The approach is illustrated using a hypothetical mobile phone example and draws upon case study work with real‐world requirements. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng