Challenge of validation in requirements engineering

AbstractThis paper will review the evolution of validation techniques and their current status in Requirements Engineering (RE). We start by answering the following questions: What validate? Why the benefits of having the requirements validation activities during the RE process? Who are the stakeholders involved in the requirements validation process? Where applied the validation in the RE process? and How the techniques and the approaches of requirements validation

Exploring issues in agile requirements engineering in the South African industry

The agile manifesto has certainly changed the way software is produced in the Information Communications Technology (ICT) industry. However, many persistent challenges cripple agile software development. One challenge is that the constant change in technology makes the requirements hard to implement. Another is that issues of the agile requirements engineering (ARE) process are abundant and pervasive throughout software projects. The aim of this study is to determine common issues in agile requirements engineering in the South African software industry and identify tools and frameworks to mitigate risks emanating from such problems. This includes finding out how much value software practitioners put in the agile principles. This study was essentially quantitative, based on a cross-sectional survey. Self-administered questionnaires were used to collect required data which was then subjected to exploratory data analysis using SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences), a tool for statistical analysis. The results show that software practitioners have a strong penchant for principles of the Agile Manifesto. Major issues in agile requirements engineering include lack of proper validation tools and techniques, scope problems, lack of proper documentation, issues of prioritisation, as well as unavailability of customer representative. A detailed baseline of issues in agile requirements engineering was created along with a set of recommended tools and techniques used in the software industry. As for the recommendation, it is suggested that companies invest more on validation tools and techniques and consider non-functional requirements integration during software development.School of ComputingM. Sc. (Computing

Generic skills development and learning/assessment proces: Use of rubrics and students validation

In order to fulfill the European Higher Educaton Area requirements in the subject 'Chemical Engineering Experimentaton II' (Chemical Engineering Undergraduate Degree, University of Barcelona), generic skills in teamwork, and both written and oral communication were developed and assessed with the help of rubrics. The methodological usefulness of rubrics in formative/summative assessment was tested by means of student validation. The students' perceptions of the teaching/learning process were collected, analyzed and compared to the academic marks. The lack of students' knowledge of the use of rubrics, their lack of commitment and proactivity in the teaching/learning process, and their lack of adaptability and high resistance to the introduction of methodological changes make further work necessary on implementation. Because of the importance of the active participation of the students in the process of teaching/learning, the process of validation should be continued. The teaching experience indicates that rubrics are useful as an assessment tool, but in order to increase their utility as a tool in the process of learning, the future challenge is to modify some aspects of the validation queries and process

Automatic verification and validation wizard in web-centred end-user software engineering

This paper addresses one of the major web end-user software engineering (WEUSE) challenges, namely, how to verify and validate software products built using a life cycle enacted by end-user programmers. Few end-user development support tools implement an engineering life cycle adapted to the needs of end users. End users do not have the programming knowledge, training or experience to perform devel- opment tasks requiring creativity. Elsewhere we published a life cycle adapted to this challenge. With the support of a wizard, end-user programmers follow this life cycle and develop rich internet applica- tions (RIA) to meet specific end-user requirements. However, end-user programmers regard verification and validation activities as being secondary or unnecessary for opportunistic programming tasks. Hence, although the solutions that they develop may satisfy specific requirements, it is impossible to guarantee the quality or the reusability of this software either for this user or for other developments by future end-user programmers. The challenge, then, is to find means of adopting a verification and validation workflow and adding verification and validation activities to the existing WEUSE life cycle. This should not involve users having to make substantial changes to the type of work that they do or to their priori- ties. In this paper, we set out a verification and validation life cycle supported by a wizard that walks the user through test case-based component, integration and acceptance testing. This wizard is well-aligned with WEUSE’s characteristic informality, ambiguity and opportunisticity. Users applying this verification and validation process manage to find bugs and errors that they would otherwise be unable to identify. They also receive instructions for error correction. This assures that their composite applications are of better quality and can be reliably reused. We also report a user study in which users develop web soft- ware with and without a wizard to drive verification and validation. The aim of this user study is to confirm the applicability and effectiveness of our wizard in the verification and validation of a RIAEuropean Union (UE) GA FP7-216048European Union (UE) GA FP7-285248European Union (UE) GA FP7-258862Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2016-76956-C3-2-R (POLOLAS)Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED

Achieving Maximum Integration Utilizing Requirements Flow Down

A robust and experienced systems engineering team is essential for a successful program. It is often a challenge to build a core systems engineering team early enough in a program to maximize integration and assure a common path for all supporting teams in a project. Ares I was no exception. During the planning of IVGVT, the team had many challenges including lack of: early identification of stakeholders, team training in NASA s system engineering practices, solid requirements flow down and a top down documentation strategy. The IVGVT team started test planning early in the program before the systems engineering framework had been matured due to an aggressive schedule. Therefore the IVGVT team increased their involvement in the Constellation systems engineering effort. Program level requirements were established that flowed down to IVGVT aligning all stakeholders to a common set of goals. The IVGVT team utilized the APPEL REQ Development Management course providing the team a NASA focused model to follow. The IVGVT team engaged directly with the model verification and validation process to assure that a solid set of requirements drove the need for the test event. The IVGVT team looked at the initial planning state, analyzed the current state and then produced recommendations for the ideal future state of a wide range of systems engineering functions and processes. Based on this analysis, the IVGVT team was able to produce a set of lessons learned and to provide suggestions for future programs or tests to use in their initial planning phase

A Comparative Study on Model-Driven Requirements Engineering for Software Product Lines

[EN] Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) and Software Product Lines (SPL) are two software development paradigms that emphasize reusing. The former reuse domain knowledge is represented as models and model transformations for product development, and the latter reuse domain knowledge is represented as core assets to produce a family of products in a given domain. The adequate combination of both paradigms can bring together important advantages to the software development community. However, how to manage requirements during a model-driven product line development remains an open challenge. In particular, the Requirements Engineering (RE) activity must deal with specific properties such as variability and commonality for a whole family of products. This paper presents a comparative study of eleven approaches that perform a MDE strategy in the RE activity for SPL, with the aim of identify ing current practices and research gaps. In summary, most of the approaches are focused on the Domain Engineering phase of the SPL development, giving less attention to the Application Engineering phase. Moreover there is a lack of coverage of the Scoping activity, which defines the SPL boundaries. Several approaches apply some model transformations to obtain architectural and application requirements artifacts. Regarding the tool support for requirements specification and management, we found that most of the approaches use only academic prototypes. Regarding the validation of the approaches, the use of Case Studies as a proof of concept was the most commonly used method; however, there is a lack of well-defined case studies and empirical studies to improve the proposals.This research is part of the MULTIPLE project (with ref. TIN2009-13838).Blanes Domínguez, D.; Insfrán Pelozo, CE. (2012). A Comparative Study on Model-Driven Requirements Engineering for Software Product Lines. Revista de Sistemas e Computação. 2(1):3-13. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/43841S3132

Hands Free Fitted Shoe

The ability to don and doff fitted shoes can be a challenge for many people including those diagnosed with diabetes, obesity, limb loss, pregnancy, Parkinson’s disease, arthritis, surgical complications, and aging. Though these actions may seem trivial, the ability to independently put on shoes is necessary because it can significantly impact one’s capacity to complete everyday tasks, hold relationships, and maintain mental health. Current competitors in the market are excessively expensive, not completely hands-free, or not fully enclosed shoes, so a new design for an accessible and affordable hands-free fitted shoe could be of great benefit to the general population. In this biomedical engineering senior design project, the team, PodAl, found a way to increase the user- friendliness of fitted shoes for those with mobility issues, deformities, or other maladies to increase independence, safety, comfort, and functionality of fitted shoes for targeted populations. This design has undergone verification and validation testing and was proven to meet customer and engineering requirements

Alignment of requirements and services with user feedback

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.It is widely acknowledged that software reuse reduces the cost and effort of software development. Over the years many solutions have emerged that propose methodologies to support software reusability. Service oriented software engineering (SOSE) advocates software reuse while aiming to achieve better alignment of software solutions to business requirements. Service orientation has evolved from Object Oriented Analysis and Design (OOAD) and Component Based Software Development (CBSD), the major difference being that reusable artefacts are in the form of services rather than objects or packaged components. Although SOSE is considered a new architectural style of software development that addresses some of the shortcomings of previous approaches, it has also inherited some of the challenges of CBSD, and OOAD, in particular in the requirements engineering process. In Service Oriented Requirements Engineering (SORE) an analyst has an additional challenging task of aligning requirements and services to select the optimally matched service from an increasingly large set of available online services. Much of the existing empirical research in SORE has focused mainly on the technical aspects while the human related issues are yet to be fully explored and addressed. The lack of empirical evidence to investigate the human related issues in SORE provides the overall motivation for the research covered in this thesis. User involvement in software development has been the focus of significant research and has been intuitively and axiomatically accepted to play a positive role in users’ satisfaction thus leading to system success. More recently, past users’ feedback, reviews and comments from online sources are considered a form of user involvement. These offer valuable information to assist analysts in increasing their knowledge for making more informed decision for service selection. In service oriented paradigm the full extent of the benefits of this form of user involvement has not been empirically investigated. This thesis addresses three important high level research goals: (1) to investigate and identify the most important challenges of SORE, (2) to design an innovative and flexible method to address the top challenge of SORE, focusing specifically on the important relationship between user involvement and system success, and (3) to evaluate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed method in an empirical study. This thesis presents research conducted in three parts for achieving each of the stated goals respectively: problem analysis, solution analysis and implementation analysis. For problem analysis a mixed method approach is used, i.e. literature review, quantitative online survey, and qualitative industrial interview study. For solution analysis a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is conducted to analyse the existing empirical studies about the relationship between user involvement and system success. Inspired by the results of this SLR, I designed the ARISE (Alignment of RequIrement and SErvices) method, following Situational Method Engineering to make it flexible for adoption in various project contexts. The ARISE method aims to exploit the benefits of experiences of past users for service selection. For implementation analysis, the ARISE method was instantiated in a case study with real life data with two objectives in mind: (1) validation of the effectiveness of ARISE in overcoming the challenges of alignment, and (2) improvement and refinement of the ARISE method. Analysis of the results of this validation revealed the need for automated tool support for the ARISE method. This automation is achieved through the design and implementation of software tools created for supporting the analysts in service selection. The systematic and mixed method research approach of the problem analysis phase identified that alignment of requirements and services was the top challenge for practitioners in SORE. It also increased our understanding of why this alignment is considered the most challenging task. The findings of the SLR confirmed that the effective user involvement in software development in general, and in requirements engineering in particular could lead to system success. In SORE, the past users of services can be involved through their feedback and sentiments about the services from online sources. These concepts were the basis for the design of the ARISE method. The results of the case study complemented by the experimentation with the automated tools revealed that past users’ feedback and sentiments are indeed valuable sources of information that can assist analysts in overcoming the challenges of alignment between requirements and services thus making a more informed decision in service selection

Testing Strategies and Methodologies for the Max Launch Abort System

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) was tasked to develop an alternate, tower-less launch abort system (LAS) as risk mitigation for the Orion Project. The successful pad abort flight demonstration test in July 2009 of the "Max" launch abort system (MLAS) provided data critical to the design of future LASs, while demonstrating the Agency s ability to rapidly design, build and fly full-scale hardware at minimal cost in a "virtual" work environment. Limited funding and an aggressive schedule presented a challenge for testing of the complex MLAS system. The successful pad abort flight demonstration test was attributed to the project s systems engineering and integration process, which included: a concise definition of, and an adherence to, flight test objectives; a solid operational concept; well defined performance requirements, and a test program tailored to reducing the highest flight test risks. The testing ranged from wind tunnel validation of computational fluid dynamic simulations to component ground tests of the highest risk subsystems. This paper provides an overview of the testing/risk management approach and methodologies used to understand and reduce the areas of highest risk - resulting in a successful flight demonstration test

Verification and validation as a key driver in modern engineering education

In the era of fast technological development in all engineering disciplines, how to improve the employability of engineering graduates imposes an even greater challenge than ever before to the educators in higher education. What constitutes key knowledge and skills for future professional engineers and how they can be developed in the graduates through our engineering courses are important questions whose answers can have a profound impact on the success of the engineering education. In this paper, the strategy of using verification & validation (V&V) as a key driver for quality learning in engineering education is proposed. The rationale of the proposed strategy and the requirements for its success are explained. An example of implementing this strategy is illustrated. In the conclusion section, a current and common issue is raised