Miki: a wiki for synchronous modeling of software requirements

Eliciting a high quality requirements model that can be traced down to implementations is a challenge. Keeping models updated for evolving software systems is a further challenge. Formal modelling methods are one approach - but one that is too rigid and costly for many small software engineering companies [1]. We propose a light-weight alternative, using a wiki as the synchronous bridge between requirements capture and more formal modeling features of the IDE such as Eclipse

Rationale Management Challenges in Requirements Engineering

Rationale and rationale management have been playing an increasingly prominent role in software system development mainly due to the knowledge demand during system evaluation, maintenance, and evolution, especially for large and complex systems. The rationale management for requirements engineering, as a commencing and critical phase in software development life cycle, is still under-exploited. In this paper, we first survey briefly the state-of-the-art on rationale employment and applications in requirements engineering. Secondly, we identify the challenges in integrating rationale management in requirements engineering activities in order to promote further investigations and define a research agenda on rationale management in requirements engineering.

Using XML and XSLT for flexible elicitation of mental-health risk knowledge

Current tools for assessing risks associated with mental-health problems require assessors to make high-level judgements based on clinical experience. This paper describes how new technologies can enhance qualitative research methods to identify lower-level cues underlying these judgements, which can be collected by people without a specialist mental-health background. Methods and evolving results: Content analysis of interviews with 46 multidisciplinary mental-health experts exposed the cues and their interrelationships, which were represented by a mind map using software that stores maps as XML. All 46 mind maps were integrated into a single XML knowledge structure and analysed by a Lisp program to generate quantitative information about the numbers of experts associated with each part of it. The knowledge was refined by the experts, using software developed in Flash to record their collective views within the XML itself. These views specified how the XML should be transformed by XSLT, a technology for rendering XML, which resulted in a validated hierarchical knowledge structure associating patient cues with risks. Conclusions: Changing knowledge elicitation requirements were accommodated by flexible transformations of XML data using XSLT, which also facilitated generation of multiple data-gathering tools suiting different assessment circumstances and levels of mental-health knowledge

Semantic-based decision support for remote care of dementia patients

This paper investigates the challenges in developing a semantic-based Dementia Care Decision Support System based on the non-intrusive monitoring of the patient's behaviour. Semantic-based approaches are well suited for modelling context-aware scenarios similar to Dementia care systems, where the patient's dynamic behaviour observations (occupants movement, equipment use) need to be analysed against the semantic knowledge about the patient's condition (illness history, medical advice, known symptoms) in an integrated knowledgebase. However, our research findings establish that the ability of semantic technologies to reason upon the complex interrelated events emanating from the behaviour monitoring sensors to infer knowledge assisting medical advice represents a major challenge. We attempt to address this problem by introducing a new approach that relies on propositional calculus modelling to segregate complex events that are amenable for semantic reasoning from events that require pre-processing outside the semantic engine before they can be reasoned upon. The event pre-processing activity also controls the timing of triggering the reasoning process in order to further improve the efficiency of the inference process. Using regression analysis, we evaluate the response-time as the number of monitored patients increases and conclude that the incurred overhead on the response time of the prototype decision support systems remains tolerable

Collaborative Requirements Engineering Notation for Planning Globally Distributed Projects

Requirements engineering represents a critical phase of the software development lifecycle in which requirements describing the functional and non-functional behaviors of a system are elicited, modeled, analyzed, negotiated, agreed, and specified. In traditional software systems these tasks are typically performed in face-to-face meetings between requirements engineers and the project level stakeholders. However, in today’s global software development environment, it is becoming increasingly commonplace for stakeholders to be dispersed across multiple geographical locations and time zones. Under these circumstances, face-to-face meetings become expensive, and often impossible to facilitate, and as a result the success of the requirements process relies, at least partially, on tools and processes that support distributed communication and collaboration. To investigate the challenges and effective practices for performing requirements activities in distributed environments, we conducted a series of in-depth interviews with project managers and business analysts who have worked with non-co-located stakeholders. Since many project managers fail to plan and deploy the necessary infrastructures to support quality communication, and in practice requirements are often elicited and managed via email exchanges; we introduced a visual modeling notation to help project managers proactively plan the collaboration infrastructures needed to support requirements-related activities in globally distributed projects. An underlying meta-model defines the elements of the modeling language, including locations, stakeholder roles, communication flows, critical documents, and supporting tools and repositories. The interview findings were further analyzed to identify practices that led to success or created significant challenges for the projects; resulting in a set of patterns for globally distributed requirements engineering

Learner autonomy and awareness through distance collaborative group work in English for Academic Purposes

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40956-6_13Learner autonomy is considered to be both an important skill and attitude of learners, which involves responsibility for and control of the learning process. A key notion in autonomy is interdependence, developed through collaboration and which results in heightened awareness. Precisely, this concept lies at the core of technology applications, which facilitate interaction and collaboration at a distance. With a growing number of online ESP situations, more attention needs to be paid to virtual classrooms and the development of learner autonomy through collaboration. In the context of a distance EAP course, this chapter examines how students carry out a collaborative language awareness task, considering that peer interaction can be an appropriate setting to develop language awareness, whether in face-to-face or online situations. Based on the framework of 'community of inquiry' (Garrison et al. 2000), this study looks at how group members interact through forum posts and wiki edits, showing how students initiate, manage and carry out the task, together with the social, cognitive, and meta-cognitive processes that are generated. Given the nature of the task, creating a language learning activity, special attention is paid to students’ focus on and discussion of topics related to language and learning. From these observations we can derive implications for online language teaching and materials design.Peer ReviewedPreprin