A Taxonomy of Current Issues in Requirements Engineering

The contents of a requirements specification is presented in light of the consensus reached both theoreticians and practitioners. The desirable properties of a requirements specification justified from a functionalist viewpoint and it is suggested that changes in the way one uses requirements may alter the relative significance of different properties. Finally, a classification requirements specification techniques is proposed and used as a backdrop against which current issues in the requirements engineering field are examined. The emphasis is on identifying general problem areas rather than offering the reader a literature survey. The paper shows that, despite significant growth, the requirements area still face a number of important unresolved issues including the need for: broader formal foundation for both functional and non-functional requirements, greater degree of formality and automation, new requirements development methods, and higher level of integration in the overall design process

A Taxonomy of Requirements Specification Techniques

A taxonomy is introduced and used as a backdrop against which current state-of-the-art in the requirements engineering field is reviewed. The emphasis is on identifying general trends and issues rather than offering the reader a literature survey. The contents of a requirements specification is presented in light of the consensus reached by both theoreticians and practitioners. The desirable proper ties of a requirements may alter the relative significance of difference properties. Finally, the classification of requirements specification techniques is approached from a total system design perspective. The paper shows that, despite significant growth, the requirements area still faces a number of important unresolved issues including the need for: broader formal foundation for both functional and non-functional requirements, greater degree of formality and automation, new requirements development methods, and higher level of integration in the overall design process

Towards a Taxonomy for Eliciting Design-Operation Continuum Requirements of Cyber-Physical Systems

Software systems that are embedded in autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) usually have a large life-cycle, both during its development and in maintenance. This software evolves during its life-cycle in order to incorporate new requirements, bug fixes, and to deal with hardware obsolescence. The current process for developing and maintaining this software is very fragmented, which makes developing new software versions and deploying them in the CPSs extremely expensive. In other domains, such as web engineering, the phases of development and operation are tightly connected, making it possible to easily perform software updates of the system, and to obtain operational data that can be analyzed by engineers at development time. However, in spite of the rise of new communication technologies (e.g., 5G) providing an opportunity to acquire Design-Operation Continuum Engineering methods in the context of CPSs, there are still many complex issues that need to be addressed, such as the ones related with hardware-software co-design. Therefore, the process of Design-Operation Continuum Engineering for CPSs requires substantial changes with respect to the current fragmented software development process. In this paper, we build a taxonomy for Design-Operation Continuum Engineering of CPSs based on case studies from two different industrial domains involving CPSs (elevation and railway). This taxonomy is later used to elicit requirements from these two case studies in order to present a blueprint on adopting Design-Operation Continuum Engineering in any organization developing CPSs

A taxonomy of asymmetric requirements aspects

The early aspects community has received increasing attention among researchers and practitioners, and has grown a set of meaningful terminology and concepts in recent years, including the notion of requirements aspects. Aspects at the requirements level present stakeholder concerns that crosscut the problem domain, with the potential for a broad impact on questions of scoping, prioritization, and architectural design. Although many existing requirements engineering approaches advocate and advertise an integral support of early aspects analysis, one challenge is that the notion of a requirements aspect is not yet well established to efficaciously serve the community. Instead of defining the term once and for all in a normally arduous and unproductive conceptual unification stage, we present a preliminary taxonomy based on the literature survey to show the different features of an asymmetric requirements aspect. Existing approaches that handle requirements aspects are compared and classified according to the proposed taxonomy. In addition,we study crosscutting security requirements to exemplify the taxonomy's use, substantiate its value, and explore its future directions

Undergraduate geotechnical engineering education of the 21st century

Forum papers are thought-provoking opinion pieces or essays founded in fact, sometimes containing speculation, on a civil engineering topic of general interest and relevance to the readership of the journal.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft