Personal recommendations in requirements engineering : the OpenReq approach

[Context & motivation] Requirements Engineering (RE) is considered as one of the most critical phases in software development but still many challenges remain open. [Problem] There is a growing trend of applying recommender systems to solve open RE challenges like requirements and stakeholder discovery; however, the existent proposals focus on specific RE tasks and do not give a general coverage for the RE process. [Principal ideas/results] In this research preview, we present the OpenReq approach to the development of intelligent recommendation and decision technologies that support different phases of RE in software projects. Specifically, we present the OpenReq part for personal recommendations for stakeholders. [Contribution] OpenReq aim is to improve and speed up RE processes, especially in large and distributed systemsPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Supporting social innovation through visualisations of community interactions

Online communities that form through the introduction of sociotechnical platforms require significant effort to cultivate and sustain. Providing open, transparent information on community behaviour can motivate participation from community members themselves, while also providing platform administrators with detailed interaction dynamics. However, challenges arise in both understanding what information is conducive to engagement and sustainability, and then how best to represent this information to platform stakeholders. Towards a better understanding of these challenges, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a set of simple visualisations integrated into a Collective Awareness Platform for Social Innovation platform titled commonfare.net. We discuss the promise and challenge of bringing social innovation into the digital age, in terms of supporting sustained platform use and collective action, and how the introduction of community visualisations has been directed towards achieving this goal

Characterising Sustainability Requirements: A New Species, Red Herring, or Just an Odd Fish?

Abstract—Requirements articulating the needs of stakeholders are critical to successful system development and key to influ-encing their long-term effects. As the concept of sustainability has entered the discourse of a number of software-related computing fields, so has the term ‘sustainability requirement’. However, it is unclear whether sustainability requirements are and should be different from how we already understand software requirements. This paper presents the results of a corpus-assisted discourse analysis study that explored the concept of sustainability requirements in order to understand how the term is being used in software and requirements engineering and related fields. The results of this study reveal that the term ‘sustainability requirement’ is generally used ambiguously and reveals significant segmentation across different fields. Our detailed analysis of selected influential papers highlights the segmented use of the term and suggests key focus questions that need to be addressed to establish a shared operative understanding of the term

A Method for Recommending Computer-Security Training for Software Developers

Vulnerable code may cause security breaches in software systems resulting in financial and reputation losses for the organizations in addition to loss of their customers’ confidential data. Delivering proper software security training to software developers is key to prevent such breaches. Conventional training methods do not take the code written by the developers over time into account, which makes these training sessions less effective. We propose a method for recommending computer–security training to help identify focused and narrow areas in which developers need training. The proposed method leverages the power of static analysis techniques, by using the flagged vulnerabilities in the source code as basis, to suggest the most appropriate training topics to different software developers. Moreover, it utilizes public vulnerability repositories as its knowledgebase to suggest community accepted solutions to different security problems. Such mitigation strategies are platform independent, giving further strength to the utility of the system. This research discussed the proposed architecture of the recommender system, case studies to validate the system architecture, tailored algorithms to improve the performance of the system, and human subject evaluation conducted to determine the usefulness of the system. Our evaluation suggests that the proposed system successfully retrieves relevant training articles from the public vulnerability repository. The human subjects found these articles to be suitable for training. The human subjects also found the proposed recommender system as effective as a commercial tool

A Method for Recommending Computer-Security Training for Software Developers

Vulnerable code may cause security breaches in software systems resulting in financial and reputation losses for the organizations in addition to loss of their customers’ confidential data. Delivering proper software security training to software developers is key to prevent such breaches. Conventional training methods do not take the code written by the developers over time into account, which makes these training sessions less effective. We propose a method for recommending computer–security training to help identify focused and narrow areas in which developers need training. The proposed method leverages the power of static analysis techniques, by using the flagged vulnerabilities in the source code as basis, to suggest the most appropriate training topics to different software developers. Moreover, it utilizes public vulnerability repositories as its knowledgebase to suggest community accepted solutions to different security problems. Such mitigation strategies are platform independent, giving further strength to the utility of the system. This research discussed the proposed architecture of the recommender system, case studies to validate the system architecture, tailored algorithms to improve the performance of the system, and human subject evaluation conducted to determine the usefulness of the system. Our evaluation suggests that the proposed system successfully retrieves relevant training articles from the public vulnerability repository. The human subjects found these articles to be suitable for training. The human subjects also found the proposed recommender system as effective as a commercial tool

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

GOSSEC: Goal Oriented Software Sustainability Evaluation Criteria

The concepts of sustainability is now aware among the software engineering researchers.  It has direct and indirect impacts on three dimensions which are environment, economic and social that results from the development and implementation of the software. Although there are studies on software sustainability evaluation that defines the software sustainability criteria unfortunately, most of the studies are focusing on single criterion rather than come out with holistic criteria of software sustainability. Additionally, the studies also focused on what need to be measured instead of how to perform the evaluation systematically. This limitation was occurred due to lack of defining the measurement goal of each criteria of software sustainability dimensions. Therefore, this study aimed to develop a Goal Oriented Software Sustainability Evaluation Criteria and organize the sustainability criteria using Quality Function Deployment. On top of that, the Goal Oriented Software Sustainability Evaluation Criteria has been constructed using Goal Oriented Measurement approach by adapting the Goal Question Metric method to assist in defining the goal that clearly defined the purposes, perspectives, and point of views of measurement of software sustainability. Hence, the Goal Oriented Software Sustainability Evaluation Criteria provides nine (9) goals and thirty four (34) sub goals for measuring the software sustainability criteria and sub criteria. The findings from the study present a set of criteria and measurement goals which can be used for evaluating software sustainability. The criteria were organized into three dimensions which are environment, economic and social.   &nbsp