A social and technical sustainability requirements catalogue

Isabel Sofia Brito is a Coordinator Professor at Polytechnic Institute of Beja, Portugal, and a member of the Centre of Technology and Systems (CTS-UNINOVA). Her main research interests are Requirements Engineering and Sustainability Requirements, Model and Data-Driven Development, Multi-Criteria Decision Making and, Big Data. She has published several papers on these topics. She has been involved in several national and international research projects (e.g., COMPETISOF, Petri-Rig, U-Bike Project). Currently, she is involved in the international applied research project HIBA—Hub Iberia Agrotech, an initiative funded by Digital Innovation Hub (DIH) and “Portugal INCoDe.2030”. She is or was involved as organiser, conference chair and program committee member in several international conferences (e.g., IEEE RE, ACM SAC, CISTI, QUATIC, CIbSE, ICT4S) and in several smaller and regional ones. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 The Author(s)Climate change calls for action from all sectors of our global economy, including ICT. Therefore, it is important to change the way we develop software to address the challenges posed by sustainability. Our goal is to contribute with a reusable sustainability requirements catalogue that helps developers be aware of sustainability-related properties worth considering during software development. The information for this catalogue was gathered via a systematic mapping study, whose results were synthesised in feature models and then modelled using iStar for a more expressive and configurable representation. A qualitative evaluation of the catalogue's readability, interest, utility, and usefulness by 50 participants from the domain, showed that around 79% of the respondents found the catalogue “Good” or “Very Good”. However, more than 5% of the expert participants found weaknesses regarding most of the evaluated questions and around 25% are neutral in their overall evaluation. This led us to evolve the initial version of the catalogue for the social and technical dimensions of sustainability to improve its completeness and usefulness. This is achieved by aligning the information gathered in the systematic mapping study with the well-established quality model of the ISO/IEC 25010:2011, as we expect most of the experts are familiar with those qualities and respective hierarchies. During this process, we found information that led us to propose two additional qualities that were not covered by the ISO standard: fairness and legislation. We applied this evolved version of the catalogue to the U-Bike project comparing the requirements elicited without the catalogue with those identified using the catalogue. The result suggests that new sustainability requirements were worth considering from a sustainability point of view, supporting the usefulness of the catalogue.publishersversionpublishe

Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering: A Design for a Global Family of Surveys and First Results from Germany

For many years, we have observed industry struggling in defining a high quality requirements engineering (RE) and researchers trying to understand industrial expectations and problems. Although we are investigating the discipline with a plethora of empirical studies, they still do not allow for empirical generalisations. To lay an empirical and externally valid foundation about the state of the practice in RE, we aim at a series of open and reproducible surveys that allow us to steer future research in a problem-driven manner. We designed a globally distributed family of surveys in joint collaborations with different researchers and completed the first run in Germany. The instrument is based on a theory in the form of a set of hypotheses inferred from our experiences and available studies. We test each hypothesis in our theory and identify further candidates to extend the theory by correlation and Grounded Theory analysis. In this article, we report on the design of the family of surveys, its underlying theory, and the full results obtained from Germany with participants from 58 companies. The results reveal, for example, a tendency to improve RE via internally defined qualitative methods rather than relying on normative approaches like CMMI. We also discovered various RE problems that are statistically significant in practice. For instance, we could corroborate communication flaws or moving targets as problems in practice. Our results are not yet fully representative but already give first insights into current practices and problems in RE, and they allow us to draw lessons learnt for future replications. Our results obtained from this first run in Germany make us confident that the survey design and instrument are well-suited to be replicated and, thereby, to create a generalisable empirical basis of RE in practice

Supporting Defect Causal Analysis in Practice with Cross-Company Data on Causes of Requirements Engineering Problems

[Context] Defect Causal Analysis (DCA) represents an efficient practice to improve software processes. While knowledge on cause-effect relations is helpful to support DCA, collecting cause-effect data may require significant effort and time. [Goal] We propose and evaluate a new DCA approach that uses cross-company data to support the practical application of DCA. [Method] We collected cross-company data on causes of requirements engineering problems from 74 Brazilian organizations and built a Bayesian network. Our DCA approach uses the diagnostic inference of the Bayesian network to support DCA sessions. We evaluated our approach by applying a model for technology transfer to industry and conducted three consecutive evaluations: (i) in academia, (ii) with industry representatives of the Fraunhofer Project Center at UFBA, and (iii) in an industrial case study at the Brazilian National Development Bank (BNDES). [Results] We received positive feedback in all three evaluations and the cross-company data was considered helpful for determining main causes. [Conclusions] Our results strengthen our confidence in that supporting DCA with cross-company data is promising and should be further investigated.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, accepted for the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'17

Towards a business-IT alignment maturity model for collaborative networked organizations

Aligning business and IT in networked organizations is a complex endeavor because in such settings, business-IT alignment is driven by economic processes instead of by centralized decision-making processes. In order to facilitate managing business-IT alignment in networked organizations, we need a maturity model that allows collaborating organizations to assess the current state of alignment and take appropriate action to improve it where needed. In this paper we propose the first version of such a model, which we derive from various alignment models and theories

An Empirical Study on Decision making for Quality Requirements

[Context] Quality requirements are important for product success yet often handled poorly. The problems with scope decision lead to delayed handling and an unbalanced scope. [Objective] This study characterizes the scope decision process to understand influencing factors and properties affecting the scope decision of quality requirements. [Method] We studied one company's scope decision process over a period of five years. We analyzed the decisions artifacts and interviewed experienced engineers involved in the scope decision process. [Results] Features addressing quality aspects explicitly are a minor part (4.41%) of all features handled. The phase of the product line seems to influence the prevalence and acceptance rate of quality features. Lastly, relying on external stakeholders and upfront analysis seems to lead to long lead-times and an insufficient quality requirements scope. [Conclusions] There is a need to make quality mode explicit in the scope decision process. We propose a scope decision process at a strategic level and a tactical level. The former to address long-term planning and the latter to cater for a speedy process. Furthermore, we believe it is key to balance the stakeholder input with feedback from usage and market in a more direct way than through a long plan-driven process