Software and systems traceability for safety-critical projects: report from Dagstuhl Seminar 15162

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 15162 on “Software and Systems Traceability for Safety-Critical Projects”. The event brought together researchers and industrial practitioners working in the field of safety critical software to explore the needs, challenges, and solutions for Software and Systems Traceability in this domain. The goal was to explore the gap between the traceability prescribed by guidelines and that delivered by manufacturers, and starting from a clean slate, to clearly articulate traceability needs for safety-critical software systems, to identify challenges, explore solutions, and to propose a set of principles and domain-specific exemplars for achieving traceability in safety critical systems

An investigation of requirements traceability practices in software companies in Malaysia

Requirement traceability (RT) is one of the critical activity of good requirements management and an important part of development projects. At the same time, it improves the quality of software products. Nevertheless, industrial practitioners are challenged by this lack of guidance or results which serve as a rule or guide in establishing effective traceability in their projects. The outcome of this is that practitioners are ill-informed as to the best or most efficient means of accomplishing their tasks, such as found in software companies. Notwithstanding the lack of guidance, there are a number of commonly accepted practices which can guide industrial practitioners with respect to trace the requirements in their projects. This study aims to determine the practices of RT through conducting a systematic literature review. Also, this study conducted a survey for investigating the use of RT practices in the software companies at northern region of Malaysia. Finally, a series of interviews with practitioners were carried out to know the reasons that influence on the use of these practices in software development. The findings showed that majority software companies do not use traceability practices for tracing requirements due to financial issues and the lack of knowledge of these practices. This study presented empirical evidence about the use of RT practices among software companies. Thus, the findings of this study can assist practitioners to select RT practices, and also enables researchers to find gaps and pointers for future study in this study domain

Prácticas de la ingeniería de requerimientos en las organizaciones de desarrollo

Se presenta una línea de investigación en el campo de la Ingeniería de Requerimientos que se ha enfocado en identificar las prácticas que efectivamente utilizan en el desarrollo de software. Se han desarrollado distintos survey en organizaciones que desarrollan software para el mercado o para una organización específica (de la que forme parte o no), así como para el mercado argentino o el exterior. En los mismos se investigaron las prácticas de requerimientos que se utilizan en los proyectos de desarrollo de software. Identificar estas prácticas provee información que permite ajustar planes de transferencia de tecnología, actividades académicas y de investigación a las posibilidades y necesidades de las organizaciones de desarrollo de software. A lo largo del desarrollo de las investigaciones se han formado recursos humanos. Los próximos pasos se orientan a ampliar las muestras y el alcance de los cuestionarios, incorporar el estudio de casos y grounded theory.Eje: Ingeniería de Software.Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Prácticas de la ingeniería de requerimientos en las organizaciones de desarrollo

Se presenta una línea de investigación en el campo de la Ingeniería de Requerimientos que se ha enfocado en identificar las prácticas que efectivamente utilizan en el desarrollo de software. Se han desarrollado distintos survey en organizaciones que desarrollan software para el mercado o para una organización específica (de la que forme parte o no), así como para el mercado argentino o el exterior. En los mismos se investigaron las prácticas de requerimientos que se utilizan en los proyectos de desarrollo de software. Identificar estas prácticas provee información que permite ajustar planes de transferencia de tecnología, actividades académicas y de investigación a las posibilidades y necesidades de las organizaciones de desarrollo de software. A lo largo del desarrollo de las investigaciones se han formado recursos humanos. Los próximos pasos se orientan a ampliar las muestras y el alcance de los cuestionarios, incorporar el estudio de casos y grounded theory.Eje: Ingeniería de Software.Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Prácticas de la ingeniería de requerimientos en las organizaciones de desarrollo

Se presenta una línea de investigación en el campo de la Ingeniería de Requerimientos que se ha enfocado en identificar las prácticas que efectivamente utilizan en el desarrollo de software. Se han desarrollado distintos survey en organizaciones que desarrollan software para el mercado o para una organización específica (de la que forme parte o no), así como para el mercado argentino o el exterior. En los mismos se investigaron las prácticas de requerimientos que se utilizan en los proyectos de desarrollo de software. Identificar estas prácticas provee información que permite ajustar planes de transferencia de tecnología, actividades académicas y de investigación a las posibilidades y necesidades de las organizaciones de desarrollo de software. A lo largo del desarrollo de las investigaciones se han formado recursos humanos. Los próximos pasos se orientan a ampliar las muestras y el alcance de los cuestionarios, incorporar el estudio de casos y grounded theory.Eje: Ingeniería de Software.Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Needs and challenges for a platform to support large-scale requirements engineering: a multiple-case study

Background: Requirement engineering is often considered a critical activity in system development projects. The increasing complexity of software as well as number and heterogeneity of stakeholders motivate the development of methods and tools for improving large-scale requirement engineering. Aims: The empirical study presented in this paper aim to identify and understand the characteristics and challenges of a platform, as desired by experts, to support requirement engineering for individual stakeholders, based on the current pain-points of their organizations when dealing with a large number requirements. Method: We conducted a multiple case study with three companies in different domains. We collected data through ten semi-structured interviews with experts from these companies. Results: The main pain-point for stakeholders is handling the vast amount of data from different sources. The foreseen platform should leverage such data to manage changes in requirements according to customers' and users' preferences. It should also offer stakeholders an estimation of how long a requirements engineering task will take to complete, along with an easier requirements dependency identification and requirements reuse strategy. Conclusions: The findings provide empirical evidence about how practitioners wish to improve their requirement engineering processes and tools. The insights are a starting point for in-depth investigations into the problems and solutions presented. Practitioners can use the results to improve existing or design new practices and toolsPeer ReviewedPostprint (published version

What have we learnt from the challenges of (semi-) automated requirements traceability? A discussion on blockchain applicability.

Over the last 3 decades, researchers have attempted to shed light into the requirements traceability problem by introducing tracing tools, techniques, and methods with the vision of achieving ubiquitous traceability. Despite the technological advances, requirements traceability remains problematic for researchers and practitioners. This study aims to identify and investigate the main challenges in implementing (semi-)automated requirements traceability, as reported in the recent literature. A systematic literature review was carried out based on the guidelines for systematic literature reviews in software engineering, proposed by Kitchenham. We retrieved 4530 studies by searching five major bibliographic databases and selected 70 primary studies. These studies were analysed and classified according to the challenges they present and/or address. Twenty-one challenges were identified and were classified into five categories. Findings reveal that the most frequent challenges are technological challenges, in particular, low accuracy of traceability recovery methods. Findings also suggest that future research efforts should be devoted to the human facet of tracing, to explore traceability practices in organisational settings, and to develop traceability approaches that support agile and DevOps practices. Finally, it is recommended that researchers leverage blockchain technology as a suitable technical solution to ensure the trustworthiness of traceability information in interorganisational software projects.publishedVersio

Why and How to Balance Alignment and Diversity of Requirements Engineering Practices in Automotive

In large-scale automotive companies, various requirements engineering (RE) practices are used across teams. RE practices manifest in Requirements Information Models (RIM) that define what concepts and information should be captured for requirements. Collaboration of practitioners from different parts of an organization is required to define a suitable RIM that balances support for diverse practices in individual teams with the alignment needed for a shared view and team support on system level. There exists no guidance for this challenging task. This paper presents a mixed methods study to examine the role of RIMs in balancing alignment and diversity of RE practices in four automotive companies. Our analysis is based on data from systems engineering tools, 11 semi-structured interviews, and a survey to validate findings and suggestions. We found that balancing alignment and diversity of RE practices is important to consider when defining RIMs. We further investigated enablers for this balance and actions that practitioners take to achieve it. From these factors, we derived and evaluated recommendations for managing RIMs in practice that take into account the lifecycle of requirements and allow for diverse practices across sub-disciplines in early development, while enforcing alignment of requirements that are close to release.Comment: 19 page