Requirements engineering in software product line engineering

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00766-013-0189-0Many attempts have been made to increase the productivity and quality of software products based on software reuse. Software product line practice is one such approach, one that focuses on developing a family of products which have a majority of features in common. Hence, there are numerous requirements that are common across the family, but others are unique to individual products. Traditional requirements engineering methods were conceived to deal with single product requirements and are usually not flexible enough to address the needs arising from reusing requirements for a family of products. There is also the additional burden of correctly identifying and engineering both product-line-wide requirements and product-specific requirements as well as evolving them. Therefore, in this special issue, we want to highlight the importance and the role of requirements engineering for product line development as well as to provide insights into the state of the art in the field.Insfrán Pelozo, CE.; Chastek, G.; Donohoe, P.; Sampaio Do Prado Leite, JC. (2014). Requirements engineering in software product line engineering. Requirements Engineering. 19(4):331-332. doi:10.1007/s00766-013-0189-0S331332194Clements P, Northrop LM (2001) Software product lines: practices and patterns. Addison-Wesley, BostonDerakhshanmanesh M, Fox J, Ebert J (2012) Adopting feature-centric reuse of requirements assets: an industrial experience report. First international workshop on requirements engineering practices on software product line engineering, Salvador, BrazilKuloor C, Eberlein A (2002) Requirements engineering for software product lines, proceedings of the 15th international conference on software and systems engineering and their applications (ICSSEA’02), Paris, FranceNorthrop LM, Clements P (2013) A framework for software product line practice. Software engineering institute. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/productlines/tools/framework/index.cfm . Accessed 22 July 2013Yu Y, Lapouchnian A, Liaskos S, Mylopoulos J, Leite JCSP (2008) From Goals to High-Variability Software Design. Foundations of Intelligent Systems, 17th International Symposium Proceedings. ISMIS 2008. Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 4994: 1–1

Stakeholder Strategy and Design Alignment Framework for Design Science Research : A Study in the Context of VR-Aided Marketing and Sales

Peer reviewe

Modeling and verification of Functional and Non-Functional Requirements of ambient Self-Adaptive Systems

International audienceSelf-Adaptive Systems modify their behavior at run-time in response to changing environmental conditions. For these systems, Non-Functional Requirements play an important role, and one has to identify as early as possible the requirements that are adaptable. We propose an integrated approach for modeling and verify- ing the requirements of Self-Adaptive Systems using Model Driven Engineering techniques. For this, we use Relax, which is a Requirements Engineering language which introduces flexibility in Non-Functional Require- ments. We then use the concepts of Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering for eliciting and modeling the requirements of Self-Adaptive Systems. For properties verification, we use OMEGA2/IFx profile and toolset. We illustrate our proposed approach by applying it on an academic case study

Analyzing evolution of variability in a software product line: from contexts and requirements to features

In the long run, features of a software product line (SPL) evolve with respect to changes in stakeholder requirements and system contexts. Neither domain engineering nor requirements engineering handles such co-evolution of requirements and contexts explicitly, making it especially hard to reason about the impact of co-changes in complex scenarios. In this paper, we propose a problem-oriented and value-based analysis method for variability evolution analysis. The method takes into account both kinds of changes (requirements and contexts) during the life of an evolving software product line. The proposed method extends the core requirements engineering ontology with the notions to represent variability-intensive problem decomposition and evolution. On the basis of problem-orientation, the analysis method identifies candidate changes, detects influenced features, and evaluates their contributions to the value of the SPL. The process of applying the analysis method is illustrated using a concrete case study of an evolving enterprise software system, which has confirmed that tracing back to requirements and contextual changes is an effective way to understand the evolution of variability in the software product line

Self-tuning of software systems through goal-based feedback control loop

Quality requirements of a software system cannot be optimally met, especially when it is running in an uncertain and changing environment. In principle, a controller at runtime can monitor the change impact on quality requirements of the system, update the expectations and priorities from the environment, and take reasonable actions to improve the overall satisfaction. In practice, however, existing controllers are mostly designed for tuning low- level performance indicators rather than high-level requirements. By maintaining a live goal model to represent the runtime requirements and linking the overall satisfaction to an earned business value indicator as feedback, we propose a control-theoretic self-tuning method that can dynamically tune the preferences of different quality requirements, and can autonomously make the tradeoff decisions among different quality requirements through our preference-based goal reasoning. The reasoning result is involved to reconfigure the variation points of the goal model, and accordingly mapped to the system architecture reconfiguration. The effectiveness of our self-tuning method is evaluated by comparing the earned business value with the static and ad-hoc methods and analysing the self-tuning process

GODA: A goal-oriented requirements engineering framework for runtime dependability analysis

Many modern software systems must deal with changes and uncertainty. Traditional dependability requirements engineering is not equipped for this since it assumes that the context in which a system operates be stable and deterministic, which often leads to failures and recurrent corrective maintenance. The Contextual Goal Model (CGM), a requirements model that proposes the idea of context-dependent goal fulfillment, mitigates the problem by relating alternative strategies for achieving goals to the space of context changes. Additionally, the Runtime Goal Model (RGM) adds behavioral constraints to the fulfillment of goals that may be checked against system execution traces. Objective: This paper proposes GODA (Goal-Oriented Dependability Analysis) and its supporting framework as concrete means for reasoning about the dependability requirements of systems that operate in dynamic contexts. Method: GODA blends the power of CGM, RGM and probabilistic model checking to provide a formal requirements specification and verification solution. At design time, it can help with design and implementation decisions; at runtime it helps the system self-adapt by analyzing the different alternatives and selecting the one with the highest probability for the system to be dependable. GODA is integrated into TAO4ME, a state-of-the-art tool for goal modeling and analysis. Results: GODA has been evaluated against feasibility and scalability on Mobee: a real-life software system that allows people to share live and updated information about public transportation via mobile devices, and on larger goal models. GODA can verify, at runtime, up to two thousand leaf-tasks in less than 35ms, and requires less than 240 KB of memory. Conclusion: Presented results show GODA's design-time and runtime verification capabilities, even under limited computational resources, and the scalability of the proposed solution

Representing Variability in Software Architecture: A Systematic Literature Review

Variability in software - intensive systems is the ability of a software artefact (e.g., a system, subsystem, or component) to be extended, customised or configured for deployment in a specific context. Software Architecture is a high - level description of a software - intensive system that abstracts the system implementation details allowing the architect to view the system as a whole. Although variability in software architecture is recognised as a challenge in multiple domains, there has been no formal consensus on how variability should be captured or represented. The objective of this research was to provide a snapshot of the state - of - the - art on representing variability in software architecture while assessing the nature of the different approaches. To achieve this objective, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was conducted covering literature produced from January 1991 until June 2016. Then, grounded theory was used to conduct the analysis and draw conclusions from data, mini mising threats to validity. In this paper , we report on the findings from the study

An OSGi implementation for autonomous Goal-Oriented deployment

Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso (graduação)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Ciências Exatas, Departamento de Ciência da Computação, 2017.Com a expansão da tecnologia de Internet das coisas, novos desafios computacionais têm surgido. Estes possuem como característica principal seu alto grau de heterogeneidade de recursos, uma vez que são compostos pelos mais variados dispositivos, os quais se utilizam de uma infraestrutura de orientação a serviços para publicarem e descobrirem funcionalidades por meio de serviços. Tendo em vista a natureza complexa de tais sistemas, torna-se necessário o uso de ambientes de gerenciamento de deployment desses recursos heterogêneos. Dentre eles, um potencial framework é o padrão OSGi, que se caracteriza por ser um framework Java para desenvolvimento e deployment de programas modulares (em bundles). Nesse trabalho, será abordada a integração do OSGi ao GoalD, uma plataforma para deployment de recursos heterogêneos conforme a abordagem orientada a objetivos, por meio da descrição detalhada da implementação de cada uma das atividades do processo de deployment autônomo, definida pelo GoalD, utilizando os conceitos e técnicas apresentados pela tecnologia OSGi.With the expansion of the Internet of Things technology, new computational challenges have risen. Their main characteristic is the high degree of resource heterogeneity, once they are composed by the most variant kinds of devices, which make use of a serviceoriented infrastructure to publish and discover functionalities through services. Seeing the complex nature of such systems, it is necessary the use of deployment management environments to handle such heterogeneous resources. Amongst them, a potential framework is the OSGi standard, which is known for being a Java framework for the development and deployment of modular applications (bundles). In this work, it will be addressed the integration of OSGi to GoalD, a platform for the deployment of heterogeneous resources that follows the goal-oriented approach, through the detailed description of the implementation of each activity of the autonomous deployment process, defined by GoalD, by using the concepts and techniques presented by the OSGi technology