Software Requirements Management Research Articles

Requirements Management Methods During Project Implementation in Conditions of Uncertainty

The purpose of the article is to study the issue of application of software requirements management methods during project management under conditions of uncertainty. It has been established that the management of requirements under conditions of uncertainty should be considered as permanent processes of system management of requirements throughout all stages of the project life cycle, which involves activities aimed at maintaining, tracking and checking requirements from the moment of their formation to their implementation and beyond. Based on the results of the research, it was found that the most common requirements management methods are: flexible (Agile) approach; advanced requirements analysis; the "Gradual Disclosure" method; models of iterative and incremental development; the "Minimum Viable Product" method; "Just-in-Time" method etc. It has been established that the use of software requirements management methods becomes especially relevant in conditions of uncertainty, as these methods allow you to effectively deal with dynamic changes and ensure the flexibility of the project. It was found that requirements management should focus on the organization, communication and development of requirements, among which the following can be distinguished: change management, traceability of requirements, communication, version control of requirements documents, etc. It has been investigated that change management involves making corrections to specified requirements during project implementation, as well as assessing the impact of corrections, obtaining permission to modify and update the necessary documents. Traceability, in turn, means defining and maintaining traceable relationships between requirements and other project artifacts, such as project documentation, test cases, and code. Therefore, traceability makes it possible to guarantee that all requirements are taken into account and corrections can be traced throughout the development of the project. At that time, communication facilitates effective communication between project stakeholders regarding the requirement and involves the conversion of updates, resolution of problematic aspects, and facilitating that all members of the working group have a common understanding of the formulated requirements. Also, control over the versions of requirements documents in order to track corrections in time. The obtained results of the conducted research serve as a basis for further research in the part of more effective use of requirements management methods during the implementation of projects in conditions of uncertainty.

Unified Modeling Language for Requirements Engineering, Strategies and Best Practices for FinTech and Beyond

Effective requirements management is crucial in the rapidly evolving landscape of Financial Technology (FinTech) to deliver innovative and customer-centric solutions. Unified Modeling Language (UML) has emerged as a powerful tool in the FinTech industry for requirements management, providing a standardized notation and comprehensive set of diagrams. By leveraging UML, FinTech companies can overcome challenges such as miscommunication and inconsistency. UML fosters a common understanding among stakeholders, aligning perspectives and enabling informed decisions. This article explores strategies and best practices in leveraging UML for FinTech requirements management, addressing complexities, utilizing key UML diagram types, and overcoming challenges. Clear communication, collaboration, documentation standards, traceability, tool support, requirement validation, iterative approach, and model-driven development are highlighted as key practices. By adopting these strategies, organizations can streamline requirements engineering, ensure compliance, and deliver high-quality FinTech solutions. These strategies are not limited to the FinTech industry but can be applied in any industry and domain within the realm of software engineering and requirements management.

Mathematical foundations based statistical modeling of software source code for software system evolution.

Source code is the heart of the software systems; it holds a wealth of knowledge that can be tapped for intelligent software systems and leverage the possibilities of reuse of the software. In this work, exploration revolves around making use of the pattern hidden in various software development processes and artifacts. This module is part of the smart requirements management system that is intended to be built. This system will have multiple modules to make the software requirements management phase more secure from vulnerabilities. Some of the critical challenges bothering the software development community are discussed. The background of Machine Learning approaches and their application in software development practices are explored. Some of the work done around modeling the source code and approaches used for vulnerabilities understanding in software systems are reviewed. Program representation is explored to understand some of the principles that would help in understanding the subject well. Further deeper dive into source code modeling possibilities are explored. Machine learning best practices are explored inline with the software source code modeling.

A proposed framework for improved software requirements elicitation process in SCRUM: Implementation by a real‐life Norway‐based IT project

AbstractSoftware requirement engineering (SRE) is the initial stage of the software engineering process and entails several challenges relating to the identification, implementation, evolution, and management of requirements for the development of software systems that meet the desired functionality quality standards. Agile software development (ASD) is a well‐known software development process that follows a lightweight and adaptive methodology to support the incremental development of software systems. Since the ASD follows an adaptive procedure (ie, a flexible, nanostructured, and dynamic approach) of software development, it becomes challenging to perform SRE that follows a structured approach for managing software requirements throughout the life cycle of software development. The primary challenges for SRE, while pursuing an ASD, include, but are not limited to, identification of incomplete requirements, implementation of vague requirements, prioritization of secondary functional requirements, and compromise on users' involvement that negatively impacts the software system's functionality and quality. To overcome these challenges, some of the recent research efforts have focused on managing different phases of SRE during software development using the ASD. However, there is a lack of solutions that provide software engineers/practitioners with a solution. Besides, frameworks to effectively manage all the phases of SRE as per the needs of the ASD are needed. We propose a framework that unifies joint requirements document (JRD) and SCRUM to incrementally (a) identify, (b) implement, (c) evolve, and (d) manage system requirements throughout the software development cycle. We have used the action research method to qualitatively validate the proposed framework based on data and user requirements collected from a product‐focused (multinational) Norway‐based software company. The results of the validation are based on statistical analysis that reflects the usefulness of the proposed framework for SRE in ASD‐based software engineering and development. Future research is the possible application of a machine learning approach (es) in the intended context for agile requirements elicitations.

Towards a new template for the specification of requirements in semi-structured natural language

Requirements engineering is a systematic and disciplined approach for the specification and management of software requirements; one of its objectives is to transform the requirements of the stakeholders into formal spec-ifications in order to analyze and implement a system. These requirements are usually expressed and articulated in natural language, this due to the universality and facility that natural language presents for communicating them. To facilitate the transformation processes and to improve the quality of the resulting requirements, several authors have proposed templates for writing requirements in structured natural language. However, these templates do not allow writing certain functional requirements, non-functional requirements and constraints, and they do not adapt correctly to certain types of systems such as self-adaptive, product line-based and embedded systems. This paper (i) presents evidence of the weaknesses of the template recommended by the IREB® (International Requirements Engineering Institute), and (ii) lays the foundations, through a new template, for facilitating the work of the re-quirements engineers and therefore improving the quality of the products specified with the new template. This new template was built and evaluated through two active research cycles. In each cycle we identified the problems specifying the requirements of the corresponding industrial case with the corresponding base-line template, pro-pose some improvements to address these problems and analyze the results of using the new template to specify the requirements of each case. Thus, the resulting template was able to correctly write all requirements of both industrial cases. Despite the promising results of this new template, it is still preliminary work regarding its cov-erage and the quality level of the requirements that can be written with it.

Analysis of Software Requirement Management Results for Physical Tests of Adolescent Pencak Silat Fighting Categories

Management of physical test result for adolescent pencak silat category in the current state is done manually so that it is prone to make errors and takes a long time which causes the data processing of test results to be less effective and efficient. This study aims to determine the needs of trainers for software to managing the physical results of adolescent pencak silat fighting category. The research method used is descriptive. Subjects involved in this study amounted to 6 trainers with certified trainer criteria, had accompanied competing athletes and academics who possessed theoretical and practical pencak silat knowledge. Data collection using was a questionnaire. Data analysis used descriptive statistics. The results of this study show that: the trainer had held physical exercises and physical tests for pencak silat. Physical tests conducted use the composition of adolescent pencak silat test match category. To run a simple test process, a physical pencak silat physical test guide is needed, together with norms for the assessment of test results. The results of physical tests that have been carried out are used to evaluate physical conditions and determine the training program. In order for the process of managing physical test results to be more effective and efficient, it is necessary to obtain the software for processing the results of adolescent pencak silat physical tests in match category. The conclusion of this research is there is a need of software for managing the physical test results of adolescent pencak silat in the fighting category.

English

English

Особливості управління процесом розроблення вимог до програмного забезпечення

Наведено технологічні особливості управління процесами розроблення вимог до ПЗ та внесення змін до них, методи і засоби яких дають змогу проконтролювати стан їхнього виконання та встановити статус кожної з вимог протягом усіх етапів реалізації програмного проекту. Проаналізовано основні поняття про план виконання завдань програмного проекту та управління процесом його реалізації, що допомогло зрозуміти суть пропонованих методів і засобів здійснення контролю за станом виконання кожного із завдань та відстеження їхнього статусу на усіх етапах реалізації програмного проекту. Виявлено проблеми, які виникають під час управління процесом розроблення вимог до ПЗ, що дає змогу запобігти непередбачені втрати і неприємні інциденти, які можуть виникнути на деяких етапах реалізації програмного проекту. З'ясовано, що більшість виявлених проблем пов'язані насамперед з: плануванням послідовності виконання робіт; контролем за станом виконання робіт; управлінням змінами вимог до ПЗ; відстеженням статусу кожної вимоги. Характер проблем, з якими стикаються IT-компанії при управлінні вимогами до ПЗ, залежить також і від специфіки їхньої діяльності. Досліджено деякі особливості управління вимогами до ПЗ в процесі діяльності компанії його замовника, виконавця та виробника, що дає змогу своєчасно підготувати відповідні плани виконання завдань програмного проекту та ефективно управляти процесом їх реалізації. Встановлено, що на початкових етапах розроблення користувацьких вимог до ПЗ процедура внесення змін має мати незначний ступінь формалізації, яка повинна постійно збільшуватися в міру просування етапів реалізації програмного проекту. Зроблено відповідні висновки та надано рекомендації щодо практичного використання запропонованих методів і засобів управління процесом розроблення вимог до ПЗ.

Managing software requirements changes through change specification and classification

Software requirements changes are often inevitable due to the changing nature of running a business and operating the Information Technology (IT) system which supports the business. As such, managing software requirements changes is an important part of software development. Past research has shown that failing to manage software requirements changes effectively is a main contributor to project failure. One of the difficulties in managing requirements changes is the lack of effective methods for communicating changes from the business to the IT professionals. In this paper, we present an approach to managing requirements change by improving the change communication and elicitation through a method of change specification and a method of classification. Change specification provides a way such that communication ambiguities can be avoided between business and IT staff. The change classification mechanism identifies the type of the changes to be made and preliminary identification of the actions to be taken. We illustrate the usefulness of the methods by applying them to a case study of course management system.

Exploring Collaborative Writing of User Stories With Multimodal Learning Analytics: A Case Study on a Software Engineering Course

Software engineering is the application of principles used in engineering design, development, testing, deployment, and management of software systems. One of the software engineering’s approaches, highly used in new industries, is agile development. User stories are a commonly used notation to capture user requirements in agile development. Nevertheless, for the elaboration of user stories, a high level of collaboration with the client is necessary. This professional skill is rarely measured or evaluated in educational contexts. The present work approaches collaboration in software engineering students through multimodal learning analytics, modeling, and evaluating students’ collaboration while they are writing user stories. For that, we used multidirectional microphones in order to derive social network analysis metrics related to collaboration (permanence and prompting) together with human-annotated information (quality of the stories and productivity). Results show that groups with a lower productivity in writing user stories and less professional experience in managing software requirements present a non-collaborative behavior more frequently, and that teams with a fewer number of interventions are more likely to produce a greater number of user stories. Moreover, although low experience subjects produced more user stories, a greater productivity of the most experienced subjects was not statistically verified. We believe that these types of initiatives will allow the measurement and early development of such skills in university students.

Software security requirements management as an emerging cloud computing service

Emerging cloud applications are growing rapidly and the need for identifying and managing service requirements is also highly important and critical at present. Software Engineering and Information Systems has established techniques, methods and technology over two decades to help achieve cloud service requirements, design, development, and testing. However, due to the lack of understanding of software security vulnerabilities that should have been identified and managed during the requirements engineering phase, we have not been so successful in applying software engineering, information management, and requirements management principles that have been established for the past at least 25 years, when developing secure software systems. Therefore, software security cannot just be added after a system has been built and delivered to customers as seen in today’s software applications. This paper provides concise methods, techniques, and best practice requirements engineering and management as an emerging cloud service (SSREMaaES) and also provides guidelines on software security as a service. This paper also discusses an Integrated-Secure SDLC model (IS-SDLC), which will benefit practitioners, researchers, learners, and educators. This paper illustrates our approach for a large cloud system Amazon EC2 service.

Toward Data-Driven Requirements Engineering

Nowadays, users can easily submit feedback about software products in app stores, social media, or user groups. Moreover, software vendors are collecting massive amounts of implicit feedback in the form of usage data, error logs, and sensor data. These trends suggest a shift toward data-driven user-centered identification, prioritization, and management of software requirements. Developers should be able to adopt the requirements of masses of users when deciding what to develop and when to release. They could systematically use explicit and implicit user data in an aggregated form to support requirements decisions. The goal is data-driven requirements engineering by the masses and for the masses.

Service Level Agreement based Scheduling Techniques in Cloud: A Survey

enterprises need to maintain plenty of applications accessing by millions of users all over the world. Maintaining their own infrastructure, managing software requirements and handling excessive internet traffic is difficult. This makes them to move towards cloud computing. Cloud computing is a service provisioning technique, where customers can rent any resources like hardware, software, or platform to develop an application. Customers need to pay only for how much the resources were consumed, can dynamically increase or decrease the resource capacity as needed. Because customers are paying for the services, they expect quality of service from the provider. Providing a quality of service and attracting the customers is a challenging issue for the providers. If not, customers will move towards other cloud providers. Thus Service Level Agreement (SLA) is made between providers and customers that include service quality, resources capability, scalability, obligations and consequences in case of violations. Satisfying SLA is very important and a challenging issue. In this paper, different framework and techniques proposed by the different authors for providing a quality of service and maintaining SLA are discussed. KeywordsComputing, Quality of Service, Service Level Agreement.

Software Requirements Management

Requirements are defined as the desired set of characteristics of a product or a service. In the world of software development, it is estimated that more than half of the failures are attributed towards poor requirements management. This means that although the software functions correctly, it is not what the client requested. Modern software requirements management methodologies are available to reduce the occur-rence of such incidents. This paper performs a review on the available literature in the area while tabulating possible methods of managing requirements. It also highlights the benefits of following a proper guideline for the requirements management task. With the introduction of specific software tools for the requirements management task, better software products are now been developed with lesser resources.

TSSR: A Proposed Tool for Secure Software Requirement Management

This paper provides a unified framework in which entire design of the project can be captured right from the beginning of the software development. This paper discusses about the requirements which should be included in the development of the requirement management tools. As the requirements, criteria which have been discussed, we introduce a requirement management tool known as TSSR (Tool for Secure Software Requirement). This tool manages risk analysis, system requirements, security of the system and project, users/group restriction, encrypted database, traceability and extension of the tool to interact with external requirement management tools. The aim of this paper is to describe the TSSR framework and its four components: Planner, Modeller, Prover and Documenter which will be helpful in interacting and managing requirements with arbitrary number of external tools for secure software development.

QUALITY SYSTEM FOR PRODUCTION SOFTWARE (QSPS): AN INNOVATIVE APPROACH TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF PRODUCTION SOFTWARE

A quality system for production software should be part of the quality management system of an organization and can be expressed as objectives in the form of processes, procedures, tools and responsibilities, designed and developed to fulfil the quality requirements. These usually are addressing the customers (external or internal), compliance with standards (effectiveness) waste reduction and better use of resources (efficiency) for continual improvement. Such systems are designed according to the requirements of the standards for quality management, software engineering and information security. Quality systems themselves could not provide all necessary means for driving the organization to the quality and excellence of a product. Still there are some gaps in the processes which are not covered by too generic standards and it is the organizational ability to cover the gaps in an appropriate way. The aim of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of our proposed conceptual QSPS model to reduce the gaps in the processes of an organization by enhancing the quality of production software. In order to achieve that goal, a mathematical representation of QSPS has been derived and an evaluation has been realized among different software quality methods. The reliability and validity of the QSPS has been examined through the practical application to the automotive industry considering the elements like: (i) Planning, time and cost evaluation (ii) Software requirements (management, risk, quality and security) (iii) Validation and verification of the implemented software before release (iv) Internal release of the software (v) Client release of the software (vi) Functional monitoring after release in the production and continuous improvement process (vii) Customer satisfaction. The results of mathematical simulation and practical application revealed that the proposed QSPS model showed superior phenomena compared with other known software quality methods and also expressed significant advantages, while using it on the production software. So, an effective application of QSPS would result in the smooth running of the production software to get a high quality product according to customer and standard requirements.

Research and Realization of the Software Requirements Management Integration Platform

This paper has innovatively put forward a requirements management integration platform which takes the requirements review as the core. The integration platform proposes a model of gaining discrete demand, realizes integration and the sharing of resources with other requirements tools, and also gives the management and selection methods of the requirements analysis review staff. The paper finally achieves a collaborative requirements review wizard system which can improve the standardization and efficiency of the requirements review.

Review of Requirements Management Issues in Software Development

A requirement is a capability to which a product or service should conform to. A meticulous consideration to requirements engineering acts as a backbone of software projects. Ambiguous and unrealistic requirements are major source of failure in the software-intensive systems. Requirements engineering processes are complex as most of the requirements engineering documentation is written in natural languages which are less formal and often distract the designers and developers. Requirements management is a continuous process throughout the project lifecycle and relates to documenting, analyzing, tracing and prioritizing requirements and then finally controlling changes. The main issues related to requirements management are usually social, political and cultural. Software requirement engineers who gather the requirements generally consider that such issues are beyond the scope of their profession as they deem them within the project management ambit. In this study, we highlight the management issues that arise in the requirements engineering process and explore the possibilities to tackle them amicably. The study is supplemented with a critical review of the existing methodologies for resolving and managing software requirements.

Capturing data quality requirements for web applications by means of DQ_WebRE

The number of Web applications which are part of Business Intelligence (BI) applications has grown exponentially in recent years, as has their complexity. Consequently, the amount of data used by these applications has also increased. The larger the number of data used, the greater the chance to make errors is. That being the case, managing data with an acceptable level of quality is paramount to success in any organizational business process. In order to raise and maintain adequate levels of Data Quality (DQ), it is indispensable for Web applications to be able to satisfy specific DQ requirements. To do so, DQ requirements should be captured and introduced into the development process of the Web Application, together with the other software requirements needed in the applications. In the field of Web application development, however, there appears to us to exist a lack of proposals aimed at managing specific DQ software requirements. This paper considers the MDA (Model Driven Architecture) approach and, principally, the benefits provided by Model Driven Web Engineering (MDWE), putting forward a proposal for two artifacts. These consist of a metamodel and a UML profile for the management of Data Quality Software Requirements for Web Applications (DQ_WebRE).

Obsolete software requirements

ContextCoping with rapid requirements change is crucial for staying competitive in the software business. Frequently changing customer needs and fierce competition are typical drivers of rapid requirements evolution resulting in requirements obsolescence even before project completion. ObjectiveAlthough the obsolete requirements phenomenon and the implications of not addressing them are known, there is a lack of empirical research dedicated to understanding the nature of obsolete software requirements and their role in requirements management. MethodIn this paper, we report results from an empirical investigation with 219 respondents aimed at investigating the phenomenon of obsolete software requirements. ResultsOur results contain, but are not limited to, defining the phenomenon of obsolete software requirements, investigating how they are handled in industry today and their potential impact. ConclusionWe conclude that obsolete software requirements constitute a significant challenge for companies developing software intensive products, in particular in large projects, and that companies rarely have processes for handling obsolete software requirements. Further, our results call for future research in creating automated methods for obsolete software requirements identification and management, methods that could enable efficient obsolete software requirements management in large projects.