A value and debt aware framework for evaluating compliance in software systems

Today's software systems need to be aligned with relevant laws and other prevailing regulations to control compliance. Compliance refers to the ability of a system to satisfy its functional and quality goals to levels that are acceptable to predefined standards, guidelines, principles, legislation or other norms within the application domain. Addressing compliance requirements at an early stage of software development is vital for successful development as it saves time, cost, resources and the effort of repairing software defects. We argue that the management of compliance and compliance requirements is ultimately an investment activity that requires value-driven decision-making. The work presented in this thesis revolves around improving decision support for compliance by making them value, risk and risk aware. Specifically, this thesis presents an economics-driven approach, which leverages on goal-oriented requirements engineering with portfolio-based thinking and technical debt analysis to enhance compliance related decisions at design-time. The approach is value driven and systematic; it leverages on influential work of portfolio thinking and technical to make the link between compliance requirements, risks, value and debt explicit to software engineers. The approach is evaluated with two case studies to illustrate its applicability and effectiveness

Requirements Prioritization Based on Benefit and Cost Prediction: An Agenda for Future Research

In early phases of the software cycle, requirements prioritization necessarily relies on the specified requirements and on predictions of benefit and cost of individual requirements. This paper presents results of a systematic review of literature, which investigates how existing methods approach the problem of requirements prioritization based on benefit and cost. From this review, it derives a set of under-researched issues which warrant future efforts and sketches an agenda for future research in this area

Towards a scope management of non-functional requirements in requirements engineering

Getting business stakeholders’ goals formulated clearly and project scope defined realistically increases the chance of success for any application development process. As a consequence, stakeholders at early project stages acquire as much as possible knowledge about the requirements, their risk estimates and their prioritization. Current industrial practice suggests that in most software projects this scope assessment is performed on the user’s functional requirements (FRs), while the non-functional requirements (NFRs) remain, by and large, ignored. However, the increasing software complexity and competition in the software industry has highlighted the need to consider NFRs as an integral part of software modeling and development. This paper contributes towards harmonizing the need to build the functional behavior of a system with the need to model the associated NFRs while maintaining a scope management for NFRs. The paper presents a systematic and precisely defined model towards an early integration of NFRs within the requirements engineering (RE). Early experiences with the model indicate its ability to facilitate the process of acquiring the knowledge on the priority and risk of NFRs

Exploiting a Goal-Decomposition Technique to Prioritize Non-functional Requirements

Business stakeholders need to have clear and realistic goals if they want to meet commitments in application development. As a consequence, at early stages they prioritize requirements. However, requirements do change. The effect of change forces the stakeholders to balance alternatives and reprioritize requirements accordingly. In this paper we discuss the problem of priorities to non-functional requirements subjected to change. We, then, propose an approach to help smooth the impact of such changes. Our approach favors the translation of nonoperational specifications into operational definitions that can be evaluated once the system is developed. It uses the goal-question-metric method as the major support to decompose non-operational specifications into operational ones. We claim that the effort invested in operationalizing NFRs helps dealing with changing requirements during system development. Based on\ud this transformation and in our experience, we provide guidelines to prioritize volatile non-functional requirements

Scope Management of Non-Functional Requirements

In order to meet commitments in software projects, a realistic assessment must be made of project scope. Such an assessment relies on the availability of knowledge on the user-defined project requirements and their effort estimates and priorities, as well as their risk. This knowledge enables analysts, managers and software engineers to identify the most significant requirements from the list of requirements initially defined by the user. In practice, this scope assessment is applied to the Functional Requirements (FRs) provided by users who are unaware of, or ignore, the Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs). This paper presents ongoing research which aims at managing NFRs during the software development process. Establishing the relative priority of each NFR, and obtaining a rough estimate of the effort and risk associated with it, is integral to the software development process and to resource management. Our work extends the taxonomy of the NFR framework by integrating the concept of the "hardgoal". A functional size measure of NFRs is applied to facilitate the effort estimation process. The functional size measurement method we have chosen is COSMICFFP, which is theoretically sound and the de facto standard in the software industry

Assessment of competitiveness of power generating companies through a riskbased approach: a case study of developing economies

The global financial crisis has shown that power companies are highly exposed to market risks. Market volatility creates competitive tension in the industry because the lack of the necessary methodological tools does not allow power companies to timely identify and measure the severity of emerging threats. Given the current situation, one of the major challenges in the industry is the creation of tools able to assist in the development of a strategy for improving the competitiveness of power companies. The article presents the authors’ risk-based approach to the assessment of industrial risks in the power sector. It assumes a certain level of long-term financial stability, investment attractiveness and, as a result, the competitiveness of the company. The aspects of practical application of the authors’ approach to the assessment of industrial risks are shown in examples of power companies

A Risk-Based Approach to Planning the Elaboration of Pharmacopoeial Monographs

This article describes a risk-based analysis of the need for elaborating pharmacopoeial requirements for 6 therapeutic groups of medicines, including an evaluation of the range and number of batches of these medicines put into the stream of commerce in the Russian Federation and a comparison of the corresponding product specification files and quality standards. The  article presents a  set of criteria for planning the elaboration of monographs for the State Pharmacopoeia of the Russian Federation according to a risk-based approach, which is used in a variety of other fields.The aim of the study was to develop a comprehensive multivariate risk-based system providing criteria for planning the  elaboration of monographs for the  State Pharmacopoeia of the Russian Federation.Materials and methods. This study focused on medicines for human use under a  range of international non-proprietary names. The  authors analysed entries in the Russian State Register of Medicines, data on the number of batches released to the pharmaceutical market, and product specification files and quality standards. The study was conducted using literature search, data analysis, and system-oriented methods.Results. According to the results, a multivariate risk-based analysis is needed for planning the elaboration of monographs for the State Pharmacopoeia of the Russian Federation and the subsequent prioritisation of therapeutic groups or individual medicines for their standardisation.Conclusions. The  suggested risk-based system for planning the  elaboration of monographs for the  State Pharmacopoeia of the  Russian Federation includes the following criteria: the social significance of a medicinal product and its value for the  health care system; the  percentage of medicinal products not tested by the national regulatory authority at the level of active pharmaceutical ingredients; the substantial number of batches and the significant range of medicinal products and the  respective active pharmaceutical ingredients by different manufacturers present in the pharmaceutical market; and the analytical procedures and requirements established in product specification files and quality standards