Formal verification of the extension of iStar to support Big data projects

Identifying all the right requirements is indispensable for the success of anysystem. These requirements need to be engineered with precision in the earlyphases. Principally, late corrections costs are estimated to be more than 200times as much as corrections during requirements engineering (RE). EspeciallyBig data area, it becomes more and more crucial due to its importance andcharacteristics. In fact, and after literature analyzing, we note that currentsRE methods do not support the elicitation of Big data projects requirements. Inthis study, we propose the BiStar novel method as extension of iStar to under-take some Big data characteristics such as (volume, variety ...etc). As a firststep, we identify some missing concepts that currents requirements engineeringmethods do not support. Next, BiStar, an extension of iStar is developed totake into account Big data specifics characteristics while dealing with require-ments. In order to ensure the integrity property of BiStar, formal proofs weremade, we perform a bigraph based description on iStar and BiStar. Finally, anapplication is conducted on iStar and BiStar for the same illustrative scenario.The BiStar shows important results to be more suitable for eliciting Big dataprojects requirements

An extension of iStar for Machine Learning requirements by following the PRISE methodology

The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning has led to Machine Learning (ML) becoming a common practice in academia and enterprise. However, a successful ML project requires deep domain knowledge as well as expertise in a plethora of algorithms and data processing techniques. This leads to a stronger dependency and need for communication between developers and stakeholders where numerous requirements come into play. More specifically, in addition to functional requirements such as the output of the model (e.g. classification, clustering or regression), ML projects need to pay special attention to a number of non-functional and quality aspects particular to ML. These include explainability, noise robustness or equity among others. Failure to identify and consider these aspects will lead to inadequate algorithm selection and the failure of the project. In this sense, capturing ML requirements becomes critical. Unfortunately, there is currently an absence of ML requirements modeling approaches. Therefore, in this paper we present the first i* extension for capturing ML requirements and apply it to two real-world projects. Our study covers two main objectives for ML requirements: (i) allows domain experts to specify objectives and quality aspects to be met by the ML solution, and (ii) facilitates the selection and justification of the most adequate ML approaches. Our case studies show that our work enables better ML algorithm selection, preprocessing implementation tailored to each algorithm, and aids in identifying missing data. In addition, they also demonstrate the flexibility of our study to adapt to different domains.This work has been co-funded by the AETHER-UA project (PID2020-112540RB-C43), a smart data holistic approach for context-aware data analytics: smarter machine learning for business modeling and analytics, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. And the BALLADEER (PROMETEO/2021/088) project, a Big Data analytical platform for the diagnosis and treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) featuring extended reality, funded by the Conselleria de Innovación, Universidades, Ciencia y Sociedad Digital (Generalitat Valenciana). A. Reina-Reina (I-PI 13/20) hold Industrial PhD Grants co-funded by the University of Alicante and the Lucentia Lab Spin-off Company

Agenda entrance complexity in international accounting standard setting: the case of IFRS for SMEs

Features of rational decision making (such as agenda entrance criteria and statement of jurisdiction) barely conceal the complexity of international accounting standard setting. In 2003, when the international financial reporting standard for small and medium-sized entities (IFRS for SMEs) project achieved agenda entrance, the International Accounting Standards Board’s (IASB) jurisdiction was to develop, ‘a single set of … accounting standards … to help participants in the world’s capital markets’. Drawing on interviewees’ recollections and other material, this study of how the project achieved agenda entrance finds within-IASB opposition to the project, arguing it was outside the IASB’s jurisdiction that dissolved with the realisation that the IASB’s jurisdiction would be changed to encompass the project. Earlier accounting works have shown that an understanding of agenda entrance is critical to understanding the accounting standard setting process. Consider Walker and Robinson (1993; 1994) and Ryan (1998). Kingdon’s (2011) model of agenda entrance helps to show the complexity of the politics and decision making messiness that resulted in a standard setting project for simplified IFRS but titled IFRS for SMEs. The complexity was particularly associated with: (i) the broader international regulatory context requiring adaptation; (ii) the limitations of ostensibly technical barriers to agenda entrance, including the boundary of the IASB’s standard-setting jurisdiction; (iii) jurisdictional competition; and (iv) sensitivities over the language such that the IASB could not agree on a suitably descriptive title. The paper responds to calls for attention to actions of individual board members and staff (Walker and Robinson, 1993; Howieson, 2009)

Creative Goal Modeling for Innovative Requirements

Context: When determining the functions and qualities (a.k.a. requirements) for a system, creativity is key to drive innovation and foster business success. However, creative requirements must be practically operationalized, grounded in concrete functions and system interactions. Requirements Engineering (RE) has produced a wealth of methods centered around goal modeling, in order to graphically explore the space of alternative requirements, linking functions to goals and dependencies. In parallel work, creativity theories from the social sciences have been applied to the design of creative requirements workshops, pushing stakeholders to develop innovative systems. Goal models tend to focus on what is known, while creativity workshops are expensive, require a specific skill set to facilitate, and produce mainly paper-based, unstructured outputs. Objective: Our aim in this work is to explore beneficial combinations of the two areas of work in order to overcome these and other limitations, facilitating creative requirements elicitation, supported by a simple extension of a well-known and structured requirements modeling technique. Method: We take a Design Science approach, iterating over exploratory studies, design, and summative validation studies. Results: The result is the Creative Leaf tool and method supporting creative goal modeling for RE. Conclusion: We support creative RE by making creativity techniques more accessible, producing structured digital outputs which better match to existing RE methods with associated analysis procedures and transformations

A Sustainability Catalogue for Software Modelling

Sustainable development is the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the needs of our future generations. It covers five different dimensions: environmental, economic, social, technical, and individual. Such dimensions are also of interest for software. For example, memory and power efficiency have an impact on the environmental dimension, the reduction of costs in software development and evolution relates to the economic dimension, the use of software for general improvement of people’s lives affects the social dimension, the software’s ability to cooperate with other systems impacts the technical dimension, and the improvement of well-being of individuals relates to the individual dimension. These various dimensions and their properties impact on each other and on the base requirements of a system. Therefore, well-informed design decisions require improved support to reason on such intra- and inter-relationships and impacts, early in development. The objective of this dissertation is to propose a catalog of sustainability requirements for later reuse during the software development process. The envisioned solution involves using requirement engineering activities to address sustainability in the early stages of the software development. The first step towards a solution was to perform a (agile) systematic mapping study in order to gain a complete and profound knowledge about the existing sustainability and requirement engineering techniques. This study was the base of our work. Our final artifact is a sustainability catalogue. This catalogue addresses four out of the five dimensions of sustainability, as well as their qualities and relationships. We did not treat the individual dimension, for sake of simplicity and time constraints, although we consider that some of its properties are included in the social dimension. The catalogue was developed using the iStar framework, and it was implemented in the piStar Tool. Such catalogue offers a generic approach that can be instantiated for particular application domains, and for any combination of dimensions. Hence, this work will contribute to the field of sustainable software development

A situational approach for the definition and tailoring of a data-driven software evolution method

Successful software evolution heavily depends on the selection of the right features to be included in the next release. Such selection is difficult, and companies often report bad experiences about user acceptance. To overcome this challenge, there is an increasing number of approaches that propose intensive use of data to drive evolution. This trend has motivated the SUPERSEDE method, which proposes the collection and analysis of user feedback and monitoring data as the baseline to elicit and prioritize requirements, which are then used to plan the next release. However, every company may be interested in tailoring this method depending on factors like project size, scope, etc. In order to provide a systematic approach, we propose the use of Situational Method Engineering to describe SUPERSEDE and guide its tailoring to a particular context.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

An empirical study on the use of i* by non-technical stakeholders: the case of strategic dependency diagrams

Early phases of information systems engineering include the understanding of the enterprise’s context and the construction of models at different levels of decomposition, required to design the system architecture. These time-consuming activities are usually conducted by relatively large teams, composed of groups of non-technical stakeholders playing mostly an informative role (i.e. not involved in documentation and even less in modelling), led by few experienced technical consultants performing most of the documenting and modelling effort. This paper evaluates the ability of non-technical stakeholders to create strategic dependency diagrams written with the i* language in the design of the context model of a system architecture, and find out which difficulties they may encounter and what the quality of the models they build is. A case study involving non-technical stakeholders from 11 organizational areas in an Ecuadorian university held under the supervision and coordination of the two authors acting as consultants. The non-technical stakeholders identified the majority of the dependencies that should appear in the case study’s context model, although they experienced some difficulties in declaring the type of dependency, representing such dependencies graphically and applying the description guidelines provided in the training. Managers were observed to make more mistakes than other more operational roles. From the observations of these results, a set of methodological advices were compiled for their use in future, similar endeavours. It is concluded that non-technical stakeholders can take an active role in the construction of the context model. This conclusion is relevant for both researchers and practitioners involved in technology transfer actions with use of i*.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

An open-source solution

Correia, R., Vieira, J., & Aparicio, M. (2019). Community radio stations sustainability model: An open-source solution. Radio Journal, 17(1), 29-45. https://doi.org/10.1386/rjao.17.1.29_1Community radio stations are important social-inclusion structures, empowering communities through media access and production, reinforcing their ties with the wider civil society. The free and open-source software movement has been established since the 1980s, founded on the freedom to use, to study, to share and to improve a software’s source code. It focuses on sharing knowledge, enabling action within a community towards a common goal. With millions of projects and market dominance in specific areas of IT, open source is one of the most successful community movements of our time. In this article, we argue that theoretical frameworks and other insights drawn from the open-source movement can be valuable tools for understanding and critically analysing the designated community radio sphere in terms of technology, content creation and community management to provide a sustainable broadcast practice, expanding already-existing inclusive environments and potentiating empowerment through participation.publishe