Requirements engineering and continuous deployment

This article summarizes the RE in the Age of Continuous Deployment panel at the 25th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference. It highlights two synergistic points (user stories and linguistic tooling) and one challenge (nonfunctional requirements) in fast-paced, agile-like projects, and recommends how to carry on the dialogue.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research

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

What Makes Agile Test Artifacts Useful? An Activity-Based Quality Model from a Practitioners' Perspective

Background: The artifacts used in Agile software testing and the reasons why these artifacts are used are fairly well-understood. However, empirical research on how Agile test artifacts are eventually designed in practice and which quality factors make them useful for software testing remains sparse. Aims: Our objective is two-fold. First, we identify current challenges in using test artifacts to understand why certain quality factors are considered good or bad. Second, we build an Activity-Based Artifact Quality Model that describes what Agile test artifacts should look like. Method: We conduct an industrial survey with 18 practitioners from 12 companies operating in seven different domains. Results: Our analysis reveals nine challenges and 16 factors describing the quality of six test artifacts from the perspective of Agile testers. Interestingly, we observed mostly challenges regarding language and traceability, which are well-known to occur in non-Agile projects. Conclusions: Although Agile software testing is becoming the norm, we still have little confidence about general do's and don'ts going beyond conventional wisdom. This study is the first to distill a list of quality factors deemed important to what can be considered as useful test artifacts

Supporting Multiple Stakeholders in Agile Development

Agile software development practices require several stakeholders with different kinds of expertise to collaborate while specifying requirements, designing and modeling software, and verifying whether developers have implemented requirements correctly. We studied 112 requirements engineering (RE) tools from academia and the features of 13 actively maintained behavior-driven development (BDD) tools, which support various stakeholders in specifying and verifying the application behavior. Overall, we found that there is a growing tool specialization targeted towards a specific type of stakeholders. Particularly with BDD tools, we found no adequate support for non-technical stakeholders —- they are required to use an integrated development environment (IDE) —- which is not adapted to suit their expertise. We argue that employing separate tools for requirements specification, modeling, implementation, and verification is counter-productive for agile development. Such an approach makes it difficult to manage associated artifacts and support rapid implementation and feedback loops. To avoid dispersion of requirements and other software-related artifacts among separate tools, establish traceability between requirements and the application source code, and streamline a collaborative software development workflow, we propose to adapt an IDE as an agile development platform. With our approach, we provide in-IDE graphical interfaces to support non-technical stakeholders in creating and maintaining requirements concurrently with the implementation. With such graphical interfaces, we also guide non-technical stakeholders through the object-oriented design process and support them in verifying the modeled behavior. This approach has two advantages: (i) compared with employing separate tools, creating and maintaining requirements directly within a development platform eliminates the necessity to recover trace links, and (ii) various natively created artifacts can be composed into stakeholder-specific interactive live in-IDE documentation. These advantages have a direct impact on how various stakeholders collaborate with each other, and allow for rapid feedback, which is much desired in agile practices. We exemplify our approach using the Glamorous Toolkit IDE. Moreover, the discussed building blocks can be implemented in any IDE with a rich-enough graphical engine and reflective capabilities

Microservice Testing Approaches: A Systematic Literature Review

Testing is a crucial part of each code development method to which organizations devote extensive time and effort. The ever-changing industry needs of business necessitate that experts adopt and support themselves to meet the requirements in microservice testing, and in the process of doing so, contribute escalation to newer approaches and essential techniques of architecture in microservice testing from the perspective of microservice testing, the advancement of “microservice†is the result of such an activity to make the testing quality better and its impact penetrates down to the quality assurance teams. Working on testing microservice has become a newer structure of this testing architecture. This study explains the challenges that the testing world has to deal with and the effective strategies that can be predicted to overcome them while testing for applications and its design with a microservice testing approaches. This study can also serve as a guide to anyone who wants apparition into microservices and would like to know more about microservice. Testing approaches that can be developed and successfully applied while working within such a landscape. However, one of the major advantages of using microservice that it offers, efficient, flexible, effective, reusability mechanism. Furthermore, it is a secure way to reduce the development and testing time and cost. The security, performance, traceability, compatibility, complexity, effectiveness and scalability become some of the major concerns when testing approaches, frameworks, tools and models are applied for each microservice repository and no previous research addresses these concerns. In this review, we present some testing approaches, frameworks, tools and models to address all these concerns

An ontology for specifying and tracing requirements engineering artifacts and Test Artifacts

Nowadays, modern software development processes follow an iterative approach, which makes possible to start the testing of a system at early stages. This approach requires recording the requirements artifacts that specify the functionality or characteristics required by the system, and the test cases that are derived from each requirement artifact. Frequently, software development organizations employ supporting tools to create and maintain these artifacts. There exist numerous tools for supporting requirements specification activities, as well as the definition and execution of test cases. These separate tools have their own databases and metamodels. The lack of integration between these tools leads to difficulties in tracing related artifacts and obtaining useful knowledge to manage the developing process. It is necessary to understand without ambiguities the concepts used by the different tools to allow them to interoperate. This paper proposes an ontology that defines and integrates the concepts included by the metamodels of different Requirements Engineering and Testing Management supporting tools. The formalization of these concepts and their relationships in an ontology language prevents ambiguity of the concepts and permit to the tools involved to interoperate with each other, to achieve semantic consistency and the tracing of artifacts. The proposed ontology used in conjunction with a reasoner provides capabilities to infer traces that are not explicit, which makes it possible to easily maintain artifacts and associations between them. The approach facilitates backward tracing from test cases to use cases and functional requirements artifacts, obtain knowledge about the causes of a defect or a poor specification, and enable impact analysis.Fil: Roldán, María Luciana. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Desarrollo y Diseño. Universidad Tecnológica Nacional. Facultad Regional Santa Fe. Instituto de Desarrollo y Diseño; ArgentinaFil: Vegetti, Maria Marcela. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Desarrollo y Diseño. Universidad Tecnológica Nacional. Facultad Regional Santa Fe. Instituto de Desarrollo y Diseño; ArgentinaFil: Gonnet, Silvio Miguel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Desarrollo y Diseño. Universidad Tecnológica Nacional. Facultad Regional Santa Fe. Instituto de Desarrollo y Diseño; ArgentinaFil: Marciszack, Marcelo Martín. Universidad Tecnológica Nacional. Facultad Regional Córdoba; ArgentinaFil: Leone, Horacio Pascual. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Desarrollo y Diseño. Universidad Tecnológica Nacional. Facultad Regional Santa Fe. Instituto de Desarrollo y Diseño; Argentin