Reusable Requirements Research Articles

Exploring Renewable-Adaptive Computation Offloading for Hierarchical QoS Optimization in Fog Computing

Fog computing is an emerging architectural paradigm for the implementation of the Internet of Things, where computation moves from cloud servers to network edges. Fog computing systems are with three characteristics: 1) low latency; 2) strong presence of real-time applications; and 3) reusability of end devices. Most existing designs of fog computing systems concentrate on reducing application processing latency, but neglect real-time requirements of applications and reusability of end devices, which may drastically degrade both functionality and quality-of-service (QoS) of applications. In this article, we investigate QoS optimization of real-time applications in fog computing systems equipped with reusable end devices and powered by hybrid energy of renewable generations and grid electricity. We propose a renewable-adaptive computation offloading approach. At the end device layer, local energy allocation schemes are designed at the application-level and component-level, where techniques of the cooperative game and mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) are leveraged, respectively. At the fog layer, the local energy allocation method is augmented to a local-remote scheduling solution by judiciously judging whether or not the computation offloading of an application needs to be triggered. The experimental results demonstrate that compared to benchmarking algorithms, our approach improves the overall and individual application QoS by up to 101.93% and 59.30%, respectively.

Validation of RP-SPF Framework: A Systematic Method for Requirements Reuse in Software Product Lines

Reuse of requirements is crucial activity in software development especially across software product line engineering (SPLE), which involves two main processes known as domain engineering and application engineering. With these two processes SPLE enables systematic reuse of requirements through proper planning and development. This paper presents methodology and result of survey of experts for validating a proposed systematic requirement reuse approach named requirements pattern for software product families (RP-SPF) framework. During the survey, 14 experts in requirements engineering (RE), SPLE and software development responded and gave their opinions on RP-SPF framework. The result of the survey shows that RP-SPF approach is suitable and can effectively improve requirements engineering activities of SPLE.

Gestão do escopo para o projeto Biblioteca de reuso de requisitos de software para diferentes domínios

The software development process requires the fulfillment of several steps, where the management of requirements proves to be one of the most complex and important. A platform that allows the access of software development teams to an online library containing a set of requirements for the domain that one wishes to implement, and that provides the reuse of these requirements can bring many benefits in terms of quality, time and costs. In this context, a project of structuring a library of reuse of software requirements for different domains is of great interest to the software development community (developers and / or organizations). The purpose of this article is to propose the project "Library of reuse of software requirements for different domains" through the elaboration of two essential documents of scope management, the Work Breakdown Structure - WBS (project scope) and the List of Requirements (product scope). In order to elaborate this work, the following steps were performed: (i) study on scope management and requirements engineering with emphasis on requirements elicitation and libraries of reuse; (ii) elaboration and validation of the WBS through interviews with senior researchers in the Computing area; (iii) preparation of the List of Requirements; (iv) validation of the List of Requirements through field research, using questionnaires, with professionals in the area of Information Technology (TI). The research led to the conclusion that the proposed Library, represented by the documents of scope management (project and product), proved to be important and capable of generating benefits for the TI area.

Requirement Patterns: An Approach for Streamlining Requirements Engineering in Software Product Families

Reusable structure is essential in all reuse-based software development processes. This provides a solid foundation for seamless management of reusable artefacts especially in software product line engineering (SPLE). One of the potential benefits provided by a well-defined structure is systematic reuse of these artefacts. Requirements pattern approach provides guidelines for requirement engineers to reuse and specify requirements. Although a plethora of research on requirements pattern have been reported in the literature, no research available focuses on requirement engineering (RE) activities of SPLE. In this paper, we present an anatomy of software requirement pattern (SRP) for SPLE with a structured example from e-learning domain. To enable practitioners, understand the concept of requirement pattern more, we present a meta-model for the SRP concepts and their relationships. In addition, we describe how the requirement pattern approach, streamlines RE activities, design for and with reuse in both domain and application engineering processes of SPLE. The requirement pattern approach thus helps in achieving systematic requirements reuse (RR) and generation of structured software requirement specification (SRS) for individual applications.

A Product Line Systems Engineering Process for Variability Identification and Reduction

Software Product Line Engineering has attracted attention in the last two decades due to its promising capabilities to reduce costs and time to market through reuse of requirements and components. In practice, developing system level product lines in a large-scale company is not an easy task as there may be thousands of variants and multiple disciplines involved. The manual reuse of legacy system models at domain engineering to build reusable system libraries and configurations of variants to derive target products can be infeasible. To tackle this challenge, a Product Line Systems Engineering process is proposed. Specifically, the process extends research in the System Orthogonal Variability Model to support hierarchical variability modeling with formal definitions; utilizes Systems Engineering concepts and legacy system models to build the hierarchy for the variability model and to identify essential relations between variants; and finally, analyzes the identified relations to reduce the number of variation points. The process, which is automated by computational algorithms, is demonstrated through an illustrative example on generalized Rolls-Royce aircraft engine control systems. To evaluate the effectiveness of the process in the reduction of variation points, it is further applied to case studies in different engineering domains at different levels of complexity. Subject to system model availability, reduction of 14% to 40% in the number of variation points are demonstrated in the case studies.

Designing an Instrument to Conduct a Survey on Requirement Reuse Practices in Malaysia

A set of questionnaire was designed to study the current state of requirement reuse practices in Malaysia. This paper describes the design of the survey on requirement reuse practice instrument, and the assessment of its reliability and validity. Cronbach’s Alpha test was used to check on its reliability and respondents’ feedback, to assess the level of understanding, the level of difficulty in responding and the level of relevancy to the subject area including the duration taken to complete the questionnaire. Results from the feedback suggested three main issues that need to be looked upon as a way to improve the instrument design. Future efforts will focus on improving the structure and contents of the questionnaire in order to achieve higher reliability and better number of responses to study on requirement reuse.
 Keywords—requirement reuse, requirement, engineering, software development, survey design

A Semi-automated Requirements Reuse and Recycling Process for Autonomous Transportation Systems R&D

AbstractThe R&D of Autonomous Transportation Systems (ATS) is hindered by the lack of industrial feedback and client's knowledge about technological possibilities. In addition, because of intellectual properties (IP) issues, technology consulting companies can't directly reuse developed functionalities with different clients. In this context, requirements reuse technics presents a good way to capitalize on their knowledge while avoiding IP issues. However, the literature review on requirements reuse processes doesn't propose methods to the application of reuse processes with little information about the system's operational context. In this paper, we present a semi-automated requirement reuse and recycle process for ATS R&D. The process helps designers’ copes with the lack of inputs from the clients. Requirements candidates are retrieved from a database using Natural Language Processing and traceability propagation. It is applied to 3 use cases with inputs less than 5 concepts from the client's needs. The results validate its efficiency through number requirements retrieved and the analysis time consumption

Extracting core requirements for software product lines

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is a promising paradigm for reusing knowledge and artifacts among similar software products. However, SPLE methods and techniques require a high up-front investment and hence are profitable if several similar software products are developed. Thus in practice adoption of SPLE commonly takes a bottom-up approach, in which analyzing the commonality and variability of existing products and transforming them into reusable ones (termed core assets) are needed. These time-consuming and error-prone tasks call for automation. The literature partially deals with solutions for early software development stages, mainly in the form of variability analysis. We aim for further creation of core requirements—reusable requirements that can be adapted for different software products. To this end, we introduce an automated extractive method, named CoreReq, to generate core requirements from product requirements written in a natural language. The approach clusters similar requirements, captures variable parts utilizing natural language processing techniques, and generates core requirements following an ontological variability framework. Focusing on cloning scenarios, we evaluated CoreReq through examples and a controlled experiment. Based on the results, we claim that core requirements generation with CoreReq is feasible and usable for specifying requirements of new similar products in cloning scenarios.

Black-box model-based regression testing of fail-safe behavior in web applications

This paper provides an approach for selective black-box model-based regression testing for web applications, emphasizing testing proper mitigation of external failures in web applications. This approach uses an existing model of web applications, FSMWeb, and extends its test generation capabilities to include selective regression testing of fail-safe behavior. It classifies existing tests as reusable, retestable, and obsolete. The approach reduces the number of tests compared to a full retest between 3% to 81% depending on the type of changes in the example and by over 99% in the case study. Removing reusable requirements reduced test requirements between 49% to 65% in the case study. The approach also uses partial regeneration for new tests wherever possible.

The ADALINE neuron modification for solving the problem on searching for the reusable functions of the information system

The problem of reducing costs in developing information systems and software products was considered. It was proposed to replace the IT project staff in a number of repeatable processes and the works connected with development of software products by intelligent information technologies provided that such a replacement is economically viable. It was proposed to use the apparatus of artificial neural nets as a tool for creation of such technologies. Among the main directions of automation of the information system development processes, there is the problem of searching for reusable functions to implement the functional requirement to the system. To solve this problem, it was suggested to modify the formal description and block diagram of the ADALINE neuron. The essence of this modification is the use of frame networks for formal description of reusable functions and functional requirements to the information system. Comparison of these formal descriptions makes it possible to identify a reusable function that, to the extent possible, corresponds to the functional requirement to the IS. Solution of the search problem results in a formal description of the functional requirement to the system. This description is formed on the basis of formal descriptions of the function found and the functional requirement. Proceeding from this representation of the search problem, a special algorithm of training the modified neuron was developed. Its essence consists in finding the maximum similarity of the formal description of the functional requirement to the system among the descriptions of reusable functions. Proceeding from the results of modification of the elements, block diagram of the ADALINE neuron was modified. The approach was proposed and the main features of architectural solutions for implementation of the modified block diagram were considered.

Development of Requirements Pattern Repository: Towards Supporting Requirements Reuse

Requirements Engineering (RE) covers the study of techniques to define users’ needs by generating quality requirements. Nonetheless, RE tasks require a considerable amount of effort and resources due to various issues and challenging aspects. A crucial RE concern is how to effectively perform the RE tasks in order to reduce development cost. Amongst the recommended technique to achieve this, is through Requirements Reuse (RR) and one of the means to attain RR is by using requirements pattern. Reusability, in general can be viewed from for-reuse and with-reuse stages. The use of the requirements patterns could assist requirement engineers to create patterns for future reuse i.e., for-reuse and/or adapt in an environment i.e., with-reuse stage. Recent developments in RR have heightened the need for suitable environment to support these processes. In the current situation, without a requirements pattern repository, requirements engineers need to manually create, store, search, select and adapt the requirements patterns, which suit their needs. However, requirement engineers also need to be properly trained in order to make decision as to which pattern to choose, how the selection can best suit their needs and also what could be saved by using the pattern. Hence, the objectives of this work are to (1) create an environment that supports requirement engineers to create, adopt or adapt requirements patterns for-reuse and with-reuse processes; (2) support for-reuse process by creating requirements pattern repository; and (3) facilitate with-reuse process by allowing the requirements pattern adaptation from the existing patterns in the repository. In this work, we analyzed the literature on how requirements patterns are applied in both the stages and defined the required environment for the requirements pattern repository. In the end, we developed a requirements pattern repository based on generic domain and domain specific requirements patterns based on Collaborative Meeting and Appointment Scheduler Domain to demonstrate the proof-of-concept to allow the repository to be operational.

Sustainability requirements for connected health applications

AbstractConnected health applications are efficient tools to improve health care services. The aim of this paper is to define a reusable requirements repository (catalog) for sustainable connected health applications based on the main related software engineering standards, e‐health technology standards, and literature. The catalog contains requirements which cover the individual, social, environmental, and technical dimensions of sustainability. The requirements presented in this paper can be very useful to connected health application stakeholders and can be adapted to specific m‐health applications. Moreover, the requirements catalog can be used to generate a checklist of requirements to evaluate and audit connected health applications. An application example is presented to show that the evaluation of connected health applications using the generated checklist is realistic.

Investigation of Requirements Reuse (RR) Challenges and Existing RR Approaches

Reuse of software artifacts could bring substantial benefits to software developers and also other relevant stakeholders. It is observed in the literature that when reuse is introduced at the initial stage of RE process say, requirements level brings more benefits than at any other abstraction level as the benefits of reuse positively affects the subsequent levels. The aim of this paper is to investigate challenges and approaches of requirements reuse (RR) in the literature and we therefore, make our contribution to researchers and practitioners in RE field in threefold: (1) we present challenges of RR in the literature; (2) we categorize RR approaches into: (a) domain specific (b) patterns-based (c) ontology-based and (d) general approaches and distinguish these approaches according to two design facets: design for reuse and design with reuse; and (3) we also present and analyze contributions of the four categories of RR approaches and highlight the gap and our future work.

E-health internationalization requirements for audit purposes

Background and objective: In the 21st century, e-health is proving to be one of the strongest drivers for the global transformation of the health care industry. Health information is currently truly ubiquitous and widespread, but in order to guarantee that everyone can appropriately access and understand this information, regardless of their origin, it is essential to bridge the international gap. The diversity of health information seekers languages and cultures signifies that e-health applications must be adapted to satisfy their needs.Methods: In order to achieve this objective, current and future e-health programs should take into account the internationalization aspects. This paper presents an internationalization requirements specification in the form of a reusable requirements catalog, obtained from the principal related standards, and describes the key methodological elements needed to perform an e-health software audit by using the internationalization knowledge previously gathered.Results:S Health, a relevant, well-known Android application that has more than 150 million users in over 130 countries, was selected as a target for the e-health internationalization audit method and requirements specification presented above. This application example helped us to put into practice the proposal and show that the procedure is realistic and effective.Conclusions: The approach presented in this study is subject to continuous improvement through the incorporation of new knowledge originating from additional information sources, such as other standards or stakeholders. The application example is useful for early evaluation and serves to assess the applicability of the internationalization catalog and audit methodology, and to improve them. It would be advisable to develop of an automated tool with which to carry out the audit method.

Component-based approach for requirements reuse

AbstractReusing requirements improves product quality and the productivity of the development process. This paper investigates how the development of new requirements can be made more productive through reuse of the experience gained on similar requirements. This can be facilitated using a component-based reuse approach supported by a framework. Therefore, the central challenge for this research work is double: (1) to define a new concept for the requirement component as the combination of two types of knowledge: reusable knowledge and knowledge of reuse; (2) to define AFR (Analysis For Reuse) that represents the capitalization process by opposition to Analysis By Reuse that represents the process of reuse itself. Finally, we provide a case study related to the requirements of a hotel system to explain how the first process works. Through this approach, we use a framework ‘Requirements Repository Framework (R2F)’ in order to capitalize existing requirements within a repository for future reuse. We present the results of an experiment with three second-level student sections that used R2F in their IS240 course project; as well as with four student groups that used R2F in their respective senior projects. The objective of this experiment is to measure the usability of the proposed AFR process.

Requirements reuse and requirement patterns: a state of the practice survey

Requirements engineering is a discipline with numerous challenges to overcome. One of these challenges is the implementation of requirements reuse approaches. Although several theoretical proposals exist, little is known about the practices that are currently adopted in industry. Our goal is to contribute to the investigation of the state of the practice in the reuse of requirements, eliciting current practices from practitioners, and their opinions whenever appropriate. Besides reuse in general, we focus on requirement patterns as a particular strategy to reuse. We conducted an exploratory survey based on an online questionnaire. We received 71 responses from requirements engineers with industrial experience in the field, which were analyzed in order to derive observations. Although we found that a high majority of respondents declared some level of reuse in their projects (in particular, non-functional requirements were identified as the most similar and recurrent among projects), it is true that only a minority of them declared such reuse as a regular practice. Larger IT organizations and IT organizations with well-established software processes and methods present higher levels of reuse. Ignorance of reuse techniques and processes is the main reason preventing wider adoption. From the different existing reuse techniques, the simplest ones based on textual copy and subsequent tailoring of former requirements are the most adopted techniques. However, participants who apply reuse more often tend to use more elaborate techniques. Opinions of respondents about the use of requirement patterns show that they can be expected to mitigate problems related to the quality of the resulting requirements, such as lack of uniformity, inconsistency, or ambiguity. The main reasons behind the lack of adoption of requirement patterns by practitioners (in spite of the increasing research approaches proposed in the community) are related to the lack of a well-defined reuse method and involvement of requirement engineers. The results of our paper are interesting for practitioners since we highlight relevant observations from the survey participants’ experiences when deciding to implement requirements reuse practices. We also suggest future lines of research based on the needs pointed out in the results.

Extracting features from online software reviews to aid requirements reuse

Sets of common features are essential assets to be reused in fulfilling specific needs in software product line methodology. In Requirements Reuse (RR), the extraction of software features from Software Requirement Specifications (SRS) is viable only to practitioners who have access to these software artefacts. Due to organisational privacy, SRS are always kept confidential and not easily available to the public. As alternatives, researchers opted to use the publicly available software descriptions such as product brochures and online software descriptions to identify potential software features to initiate the RR process. The aim of this paper is to propose a semi-automated approach, known as Feature Extraction for Reuse of Natural Language requirements (FENL), to extract phrases that can represent software features from software reviews in the absence of SRS as a way to initiate the RR process. FENL is composed of four stages, which depend on keyword occurrences from several combinations of nouns, verbs, and/or adjectives. In the experiment conducted, phrases that could reflect software features, which reside within online software reviews were extracted by utilising the techniques from information retrieval (IR) area. As a way to demonstrate the feature groupings phase, a semi-automated approach to group the extracted features were then conducted with the assistance of a modified word overlap algorithm. As for the evaluation, the proposed extraction approach is evaluated through experiments against the truth data set created manually. The performance results obtained from the feature extraction phase indicates that the proposed approach performed comparably with related works in terms of recall, precision, and F-Measure.

Reusing functional software requirements in small-sized software enterprises: a model oriented to the catalog of requirements

Software reuse can be defined as the process of creating software products from the existing ones rather than developing software from scratch. Thus, software reuse is normally proposed to increase software productivity and quality and leads to economic benefits. In this sense, the reuse of software requirements has received important attention because it provides a solid support to develop quality software through obtaining and reusing quality software requirements [i.e., software product line (SPL) approach used in large-sized software enterprises]. However, the small-sized enterprises--which represent up to 85 % of all software organizations in many countries around the world--cannot implement a SPL approach because it does not fit with the context, properties, and complexity of their software projects. Moreover, the software engineering community has not adequately explored a more proper approach in the context of small-sized software enterprises. The use of a software requirements catalog could be this proper approach. In this context, the aim of this paper was to introduce the requirements reuse model for software requirements catalog (RRMSRC). Also, a set of guidelines to perform the main activities defined for reusing functional requirements within small-sized software enterprises is provided. As evidence of its feasibility, RRMSRC has been used in an industrial context, and the obtained results and learned lessons are summarized.

A proposed model for reuse of software requirements in requirements catalog

Nowadays, the demand for higher quality in software products causes the increased complexity of these products. These two aspects (quality and complexity) combined with productivity are key elements for improving the competitiveness between software companies and differentiating success from failure in the software industry. In this sense, software reuse, and requirements reuse in particular, has been widely recognized as an effective way to improve software quality and productivity. In this paper, we propose a model to reuse the software requirements in a Requirements Catalog. This research aims to define the guidelines to carry out the requirements reuse process through four principal activities: searching, selecting, adapting, and implementing. Also, the commercial tool Computer-Aided Requirements Engineering Rational RequisitePro was tailored to make feasible the implementation of the proposed model; in this sense, a tool plug-in was developed. Finally, a case study is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed model. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

SOA-Cloud Computing Based Fast and Scalable Simulation Architecture for Advanced Flight Management System

This paper presents a SOA and cloud computing based architecture for the distributed simulation of advanced flight management system (FMS). The architecture is designed to facilitate the fast simulation, validation and evaluation of different FMS system designs and functionalities with customized system configurations and widely varying aircraft equipage levels under various operation conditions. It is also intended to accommodate the potential evolutionary extensions of new avionics concepts and functionalities such as the future CNS/ATM and 4-D trajectory based technologies. To address the requirements of flexibility, scalability and reusability, the design of the simulation architecture takes advantage of the cloud computing and service oriented architecture (SOA) and the key enabling technologies are developed: simulation unit service encapsulation, simulation agent technology and simulation orchestration. Based on the proposed architecture associated technologies, the simulation components are encapsulated as services or accessed through agents, and the configuration of different FMS system frameworks and simulation tasks can be achieved through simulation orchestration. A prototype avionic simulation system that implements the SOA/cloud computing architecture is developed and illustrated with application cases. The applications demonstrate that the proposed architecture enables fast and scalable simulation of both existing and new FMS design and technologies.