Going on-line on a shoestring: An experiment in concurrent development of requirements and architecture

A number of on-line applications were built for a small university using a micro-sized development team. Four ideas were tested during the project: the Twin Peaks development model, using fully functional prototypes in the requirements elicitation process, some core practices of Extreme Programming, and the use of open-source software in a production environment. Certain project management techniques and their application to a micro-sized development effort were also explored. These ideas and techniques proved effective in developing many significant Internet and networked applications in a short time and at very low cost

The Unfulfilled Potential of Data-Driven Decision Making in Agile Software Development

With the general trend towards data-driven decision making (DDDM), organizations are looking for ways to use DDDM to improve their decisions. However, few studies have looked into the practitioners view of DDDM, in particular for agile organizations. In this paper we investigated the experiences of using DDDM, and how data can improve decision making. An emailed questionnaire was sent out to 124 industry practitioners in agile software developing companies, of which 84 answered. The results show that few practitioners indicated a widespread use of DDDM in their current decision making practices. The practitioners were more positive to its future use for higher-level and more general decision making, fairly positive to its use for requirements elicitation and prioritization decisions, while being less positive to its future use at the team level. The practitioners do see a lot of potential for DDDM in an agile context; however, currently unfulfilled

Designing requirements engineering research

Engineering sciences study different different topics than natural sciences, and utility is an essential factor in choosing engineering research problems. But despite these differences, research methods for the engineering sciences are no different than research methods for any other kind of science. At most there is a difference in emphasis. In the case of requirements engineering research - and more generally software engineering research - there is a confusion about the relative roles of research and about design and the methods appropriate for each of these activities. This paper analyzes these roles and provides a classification of research methods that can be used in any science—engineering or otherwise

Maps of Lessons Learnt in Requirements Engineering

Both researchers and practitioners have emphasized the importance of learning from past experiences and its consequential impact on project time, cost, and quality. However, from the survey we conducted of requirements engineering (RE) practitioners, over 70\% of the respondents stated that they seldom use RE lessons in the RE process, though 85\% of these would use such lessons if readily available. Our observation, however, is that RE lessons are scattered, mainly implicitly, in the literature and practice, which obviously, does not help the situation. We, therefore, present ``maps” of RE lessons which would highlight weak (dark) and strong (bright) areas of RE (and hence RE theories). Such maps would thus be: (a) a driver for research to ``light up” the darker areas of RE and (b) a guide for practice to benefit from the brighter areas. To achieve this goal, we populated the maps with over 200 RE lessons elicited from literature and practice using a systematic literature review and survey. The results show that approximately 80\% of the elicited lessons are implicit and that approximately 70\% of the lessons deal with the elicitation, analysis, and specification RE phases only. The RE Lesson Maps, elicited lessons, and the results from populating the maps provide novel scientific groundings for lessons learnt in RE as this topic has not yet been systematically studied in the field

Agile Requirements Engineering: A systematic literature review

Nowadays, Agile Software Development (ASD) is used to cope with increasing complexity in system development. Hybrid development models, with the integration of User-Centered Design (UCD), are applied with the aim to deliver competitive products with a suitable User Experience (UX). Therefore, stakeholder and user involvement during Requirements Engineering (RE) are essential in order to establish a collaborative environment with constant feedback loops. The aim of this study is to capture the current state of the art of the literature related to Agile RE with focus on stakeholder and user involvement. In particular, we investigate what approaches exist to involve stakeholder in the process, which methodologies are commonly used to present the user perspective and how requirements management is been carried out. We conduct a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) with an extensive quality assessment of the included studies. We identified 27 relevant papers. After analyzing them in detail, we derive deep insights to the following aspects of Agile RE: stakeholder and user involvement, data gathering, user perspective, integrated methodologies, shared understanding, artifacts, documentation and Non-Functional Requirements (NFR). Agile RE is a complex research field with cross-functional influences. This study will contribute to the software development body of knowledge by assessing the involvement of stakeholder and user in Agile RE, providing methodologies that make ASD more human-centric and giving an overview of requirements management in ASD.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED

A Process Framework for Semantics-aware Tourism Information Systems

The growing sophistication of user requirements in tourism due to the advent of new technologies such as the Semantic Web and mobile computing has imposed new possibilities for improved intelligence in Tourism Information Systems (TIS). Traditional software engineering and web engineering approaches cannot suffice, hence the need to find new product development approaches that would sufficiently enable the next generation of TIS. The next generation of TIS are expected among other things to: enable semantics-based information processing, exhibit natural language capabilities, facilitate inter-organization exchange of information in a seamless way, and evolve proactively in tandem with dynamic user requirements. In this paper, a product development approach called Product Line for Ontology-based Semantics-Aware Tourism Information Systems (PLOSATIS) which is a novel hybridization of software product line engineering, and Semantic Web engineering concepts is proposed. PLOSATIS is presented as potentially effective, predictable and amenable to software process improvement initiatives

Review of Requirement Engineering Approaches for Software Product Lines

The Software Product Lines (SPL) paradigm is one of the most recent topics of interest for the software engineering community. On the one hand, the Software Product Lines is based on a reuse strategy with the aim to reduce the global time-to-market of the software product, to improve the software product quality, and to reduce the cost. On the other hand, traditional Requirement Engineering approaches could not be appropriated to deal with the new challenges that arises the SPL adoption. In the last years, several approaches have been proposed to cover this limitation. This technical report presents an analysis of specific approaches used in the development of SPL to provide solutions to model variability and to deal with the requirements engineering activities. The obtained results show that most of the research in this context is focused on the Domain Engineering, covering mainly the Feature Modeling and the Scenario Modeling. Among the studied approaches, only one of them supported the delta identification; this fact implies that new mechanisms to incorporate new deltas in the Domain specification are needed. Regarding the SPL adoption strategy, most of the approaches support a proactive strategy. However, this strategy is the most expensive and risk-prone. Finally, most of the approaches were based on modeling requirements with feature models giving less support to other important activities in the requirements engineering process such as elicitation, validation, or verification of requirements. The results of this study provide a wide view of the current state of research in requirements engineering for SPL and also highlight possible research gaps that may be of interest for researchers and practitioners.Blanes Domínguez, D.; Insfrán Pelozo, CE. (2011). Review of Requirement Engineering Approaches for Software Product Lines. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/1023