Improving Requirements-Test Alignment by Prescribing Practices that Mitigate Communication Gaps

The communication of requirements within software development is vital for project success. Requirements engineering and testing are two processes that when aligned can enable the discovery of issues and misunderstandings earlier, rather than later, and avoid costly and time-consuming rework and delays. There are a number of practices that support requirements-test alignment. However, each organisation and project is different and there is no one-fits-all set of practices. The software process improvement method called Gap Finder is designed to increase requirements-test alignment. The method contains two parts: an assessment part and a prescriptive part. It detects potential communication gaps between people and between artefacts (the assessment part), and identifies practices for mitigating these gaps (the prescriptive part). This paper presents the design and formative evaluation of the prescriptive part; an evaluation of the assessment part was published previously. The Gap Finder method was constructed using a design science research approach and is built on the Theory of Distances for Software Engineering, which in turn is grounded in empirical evidence from five case companies. The formative evaluation was performed through a case study in which Gap Finder was applied to an on-going development project. A qualitative and mixed-method approach was taken in the evaluation, including ethnographically-informed observations. The results show that Gap Finder can detect relevant communication gaps and seven of the nine prescribed practices were deemed practically relevant for mitigating these gaps. The project team found the method to be useful and supported joint reflection and improvement of their requirements communication. Our findings demonstrate that an empirically-based theory can be used to improve software development practices and provide a foundation for further research on factors that affect requirements communicatio

Formal Requirements Analysis and Specification-Based Testing in Cyber-Physical Systems

openFormal requirements analysis plays an important role in the design of safety- and security-critical complex systems such as, e.g., Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). It can help in detecting problems early in the system development life-cycle, reducing time and cost to completion. Moreover, its results can be employed at the end of the process to validate the implemented system, guiding the testing phase. Despite its importance, requirements analysis is still largely carried out manually due to the intrinsic difficulty of dealing with natural language requirements, the most common way to represent them. However, manual reviews are time-consuming and error-prone, reducing the potential benefit of the requirement engineering process. Automation can be achieved with the employment of formal methods, but their application is still limited by their complexity and lack of specialized tools. In this work we focus on the analysis of requirements for the design of CPSs, and on how to automatize some activities related to such analysis. We first study how to formalize requirements expressed in a structured English language, encode them in linear temporal logic, check their consistency with off-the-shelf model checkers, and find minimal set of conflicting requirements in case of inconsistency. We then present a new methodology to automatically generate tests from requirements and execute them on a given system, without requiring knowledge of its internal structure. Finally, we provide a set of tools that implement the studied algorithms and provide easy-to-use interfaces to help their adoption from the users.openXXXIII CICLO - INFORMATICA E INGEGNERIA DEI SISTEMI/ COMPUTER SCIENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING - Informatica/computer sciencePULINA, LUCAVuotto, Simon

The role of distances in requirements communication: a case study

Requirements communication plays a vital role in development projects in coordinating the customers, the business roles and the software engineers. Communication gaps represent a significant source of project failures and overruns. For example, misunderstood or uncommunicated requirements can lead to software that does not meet the customers’ requirements, and subsequent low number of sales or additional cost required to redo the implementation. We propose that RE (Requirements Engineering) distance measures are useful for locating gaps in requirements communication and for improving on development practice. In this paper, we present a case study of one software development project to evaluate this proposition. Thirteen RE distances were measured including geographical and cognitive distances between project members, and semantic distances between requirements and testing artefacts. The findings confirm that RE distances impact requirements communication and project coordi- nation. Furthermore, the concept of distances was found to enable constructive group reflection on communication gaps and improvements to development practices. The insights reported in this paper can provide practitioners with an increased awareness of distances and their impact. Furthermore, the results provide a stepping stone for further research into RE distances and methods for improving on software development processes and practices

Automatic classification of requirements based on convolutional neural networks

The results of the requirements engineering process are predominantly documented in natural language requirements specifications. Besides the actual requirements, these documents contain additional content such as explanations, summaries, and figures. For the later use of requirements specifications, it is important to be able to differentiate between legally relevant requirements and other auxiliary content. Therefore, one of our industry partners demands the requirements engineers to manually label each content element of a requirements specification as "requirement" or "information". However, this manual labeling task is time-consuming and error-prone. In this paper, we present an approach to automatically classify content elements of a natural language requirements specification as "requirement" or "information". Our approach uses convolutional neural networks. In an initial evaluation on a real-world automotive requirements specification, our approach was able to detect requirements with a precision of 0.73 and a recall of 0.89. The approach increases the quality of requirements specifications in the sense that it discriminates important content for following activities (e.g., which parts of the specification do I need to test?)

2018 Faculty Excellence Showcase, AFIT Graduate School of Engineering & Management

Excerpt: As an academic institution, we strive to meet and exceed the expectations for graduate programs and laud our values and contributions to the academic community. At the same time, we must recognize, appreciate, and promote the unique non-academic values and accomplishments that our faculty team brings to the national defense, which is a priority of the Federal Government. In this respect, through our diverse and multi-faceted contributions, our faculty, as a whole, excel, not only along the metrics of civilian academic expectations, but also along the metrics of military requirements, and national priorities

CIWAG Maritime Irregular Warfare Workshop Workbook

CIWAG hosted a Maritime Irregular Warfare Workshop on 25-26 June, 2019. The invited U.S. and international academics discussed the strategic and operational challenges associated with irregular warfare in the maritime domain. Participating scholars presented proposals for CIWAG’s new maritime focused case studies series. This workbook contains the first cases in the new “Maritime Irregular Warfare Studies” series.https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/ciwag-symposia/1006/thumbnail.jp

Overview and Summary of the Third AIAA High Lift Prediction Workshop

The third AIAA CFD High-Lift Prediction Workshop was held in Denver, Colorado, in June 2017. The goals of the workshop continued in the tradition of the first and second high-lift workshops: to assess the numerical prediction capability of current-generation computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technology for swept, medium/high-aspect-ratio wings in landing/takeoff (high-lift) configurations. This workshop analyzed the flow over two different configurations, a clean high-lift version of the NASA Common Research Model, and the JAXA Standard Model. The former was a CFD-only study, as experimental data were not available prior to the workshop. The latter was a nacelle/pylon installation study that included comparison with experimental wind tunnel data. The workshop also included a 2-D turbulence model verification exercise. Thirty-five participants submitted a total of 79 data sets of CFD results. A variety of grid systems (both structured and unstructured) as well as different flow simulation methodologies (including Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes and Lattice-Boltzmann) were used. This paper analyzes the combined results from all workshop participants. A statistical summary of the CFD results is also included