PABRE: Pattern-Based Requirements Elicitation

This paper presents our PABRE method for facilitating Requirements Elicitation on the basis of Requirement Patterns with the goal of saving time and reducing errors during this activity. The process presented applies for elicitation in Off-The-Shelf selection projects driven by call for tenders processes and uses a Requirement Patterns Catalogue. The process selects patterns from the catalogue that apply to the particular selection project, and convert them into the real requirements that finally configure the project Requirements Book. We show some benefits of the pattern approach for requirements engineers and IT consultants, as well as for customers. Finally we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the proposal and identify some future work.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Modeling high-performance wormhole NoCs for critical real-time embedded systems

Manycore chips are a promising computing platform to cope with the increasing performance needs of critical real-time embedded systems (CRTES). However, manycores adoption by CRTES industry requires understanding task's timing behavior when their requests use manycore's network-on-chip (NoC) to access hardware shared resources. This paper analyzes the contention in wormhole-based NoC (wNoC) designs - widely implemented in the high-performance domain - for which we introduce a new metric: worst-contention delay (WCD) that captures wNoC impact on worst-case execution time (WCET) in a tighter manner than the existing metric, worst-case traversal time (WCTT). Moreover, we provide an analytical model of the WCD that requests can suffer in a wNoC and we validate it against wNoC designs resembling those in the Tilera-Gx36 and the Intel-SCC 48-core processors. Building on top of our WCD analytical model, we analyze the impact on WCD that different design parameters such as the number of virtual channels, and we make a set of recommendations on what wNoC setups to use in the context of CRTES.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

On the use of requirement patterns to analyse request for proposal documents

Requirements reuse is still today a difficult goal to achieve. One particular context in which requirements reuse may give more benefits than costs is that of call for tenders projects, due to the similarity of the requirements documents (which take the form of requests for proposal documents, RfPs) from one project to another. In this paper, we present an approach aimed at making systematic the assessment of RfPs that technology providers need to conduct in order to decide whether they present a bid or not in a call for tenders project. The approach extends a metamodel we already defined for the former PABRE method, which has a similar goal but from the perspective of the organization that issues the call for tenders. The method is illustrated with an exploratory case study in the field of the railway systems domain.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A pattern-based method for building requirements documents in call-for-tender processes

This paper presents our PABRE method for facilitating Requirements Elicitation on the basis of Requirement Patterns with the goal of saving time and reducing errors during this activity. The process presented applies for elicitation in Off-The-Shelf selection projects driven by call-for-tender processes and uses a Requirement Patterns Catalogue. The process selects patterns from the catalogue that apply to the particular selection project, and convert them into the real requirements that finally configure the project Requirements Document. We show some benefits of the pattern approach for requirements engineers and IT consultants, as well as for customers. Finally we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the proposal and identify some future work.Postprint (published version