Capabilities Engineering: Constructing Change-Tolerant Systems

We propose a Capabilities-based approach for building long-lived, complex systems that have lengthy development cycles. User needs and technology evolve during these extended development periods, and thereby, inhibit a fixed requirements-oriented solution specification. In effect, for complex emergent systems, the traditional approach of baselining requirements results in an unsatisfactory system. Therefore, we present an alternative approach, Capabilities Engineering, which mathematically exploits the structural semantics of the Function Decomposition graph - a representation of user needs - to formulate Capabilities. For any given software system, the set of derived Capabilities embodies change-tolerant characteristics. More specifically, each individual Capability is a functional abstraction constructed to be highly cohesive and to be minimally coupled with its neighbors. Moreover, the Capability set is chosen to accommodate an incremental development approach, and to reflect the constraints of technology feasibility and implementation schedules. We discuss our validation activities to empirically prove that the Capabilities-based approach results in change-tolerant systems.Comment: 10 pages, 4 Figures, To Appear in Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 200

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DATABASE DEVELOPMENT LIFE CYCLE

A software development life cycle model (SDLC) consists of a set of processes (planning, requirements, design, development, testing, installation and maintenance) defined to accomplish the task of developing a software application that is functionally correct and satisfies the user’s needs. These set of processes, when arranged in different orders, characterize different types of life cycles. When developing a database, the order of these tasks is very important to efficiently and correctly transform the user’s requirements into an operational database. These SDLCs are generally defined very broadly and are not specific for a particular type of application. In this paper the authors emphasize that there should be a SDLC that is specific to database applications. Database applications do not have the same characteristics as other software applications and thus a specific database development life cycle (DBDLC) is needed. A DBDLC should accommodate properties like scope restriction, progressive enhancement, incremental planning and pre-defined structure.Software Development, Database, DBMS, lifecycle model, traditional lifecycles

Requirements engineering process in the CIC development: The divercity project case study

Understanding the users’ real requirements is absolutely critical to the development of successful information systems. To achieve a user-oriented and a high level quality of system and to increase the implementation of the integrated software systems, it is important that the user requirements must be captured and modelled in the right way. If done correctly, the software to be developed will meet the user’ needs and lead to better user satisfaction and implementation. This paper describes the case study of requirements engineering process adopted in the DIVERCITY system development. DIVERCITY was an EU funded project undertaken by a European consortium of researchers and practitioners from the construction industry. They were working together in an attempt to develop VR based software that enables the industry to better undertake the client briefing, design review, and construction planning phases of a construction project. It is the acronym for the project and the prototype: Distributed Virtual Workspace for enhancing Communication within the Construction Industry. The techniques used for capturing the requirements, and modelling, verification and validation are explained. Furthermore, the need for user requirements, key criteria definition for the evaluation and mastering the requirements engineering process for the future integrated system developments are also described

Iterative criteria-based approach to engineering the requirements of software development methodologies

Software engineering endeavours are typically based on and governed by the requirements of the target software; requirements identification is therefore an integral part of software development methodologies. Similarly, engineering a software development methodology (SDM) involves the identification of the requirements of the target methodology. Methodology engineering approaches pay special attention to this issue; however, they make little use of existing methodologies as sources of insight into methodology requirements. The authors propose an iterative method for eliciting and specifying the requirements of a SDM using existing methodologies as supplementary resources. The method is performed as the analysis phase of a methodology engineering process aimed at the ultimate design and implementation of a target methodology. An initial set of requirements is first identified through analysing the characteristics of the development situation at hand and/or via delineating the general features desirable in the target methodology. These initial requirements are used as evaluation criteria; refined through iterative application to a select set of relevant methodologies. The finalised criteria highlight the qualities that the target methodology is expected to possess, and are therefore used as a basis for de. ning the final set of requirements. In an example, the authors demonstrate how the proposed elicitation process can be used for identifying the requirements of a general object-oriented SDM. Owing to its basis in knowledge gained from existing methodologies and practices, the proposed method can help methodology engineers produce a set of requirements that is not only more complete in span, but also more concrete and rigorous

The knowledge-based software assistant

Where the Knowledge Based Software Assistant (KBSA) is now, four years after the initial report, is discussed. Also described is what the Rome Air Development Center expects at the end of the first contract iteration. What the second and third contract iterations will look like are characterized

The REquirements TRacing On target (RETRO).NET Dataset

This paper presents the REquirements TRacing On target (RETRO).NET dataset. The dataset includes the requirement specification, the source code files (C# and Visual Basic), the gold standard/answer set for tracing the artifacts to each other, as well as the script used to parse the requirements from the specification (to put in RETRO.NET format). The dataset can be used to support tracing and other tasks.Comment: We thank NSF for partially funding this work under grants CCF-1511117 and CICI 1642134; 4 pages; in Proceedings of IEEE Requirements Engineering 201

Compositional Verification of Evolving Software Product Lines

This paper presents a novel approach to the design verification of Software Product Lines(SPL). The proposed approach assumes that the requirements and designs are modeled as finite state machines with variability information. The variability information at the requirement and design levels are expressed differently and at different levels of abstraction. Also the proposed approach supports verification of SPL in which new features and variability may be added incrementally. Given the design and requirements of an SPL, the proposed design verification method ensures that every product at the design level behaviorally conforms to a product at the requirement level. The conformance procedure is compositional in the sense that the verification of an entire SPL consisting of multiple features is reduced to the verification of the individual features. The method has been implemented and demonstrated in a prototype tool SPLEnD (SPL Engine for Design Verification) on a couple of fairly large case studies

Bio-inspired Requirements Variability Modeling with Use Case

Background. Feature Model (FM) is the most important technique used to manage the variability through products in Software Product Lines (SPLs). Often, the SPLs requirements variability is by using variable use case model which is a real challenge in actual approaches: large gap between their concepts and those of real world leading to bad quality, poor supporting FM, and the variability does not cover all requirements modeling levels. Aims. This paper proposes a bio-inspired use case variability modeling methodology dealing with the above shortages. Method. The methodology is carried out through variable business domain use case meta modeling, variable applications family use case meta modeling, and variable specific application use case generating. Results. This methodology has leaded to integrated solutions to the above challenges: it decreases the gap between computing concepts and real world ones. It supports use case variability modeling by introducing versions and revisions features and related relations. The variability is supported at three meta levels covering business domain, applications family, and specific application requirements. Conclusion. A comparative evaluation with the closest recent works, upon some meaningful criteria in the domain, shows the conceptual and practical great value of the proposed methodology and leads to promising research perspective

A Thematic Study of Requirements Modeling and Analysis for Self-Adaptive Systems

Over the last decade, researchers and engineers have developed a vast body of methodologies and technologies in requirements engineering for self-adaptive systems. Although existing studies have explored various aspects of this topic, few of them have categorized and summarized these areas of research in require-ments modeling and analysis. This study aims to investigate the research themes based on the utilized modeling methods and RE activities. We conduct a thematic study in the systematic literature review. The results are derived by synthesizing the extracted data with statistical methods. This paper provides an updated review of the research literature, enabling researchers and practitioners to better understand the research themes in these areas and identify research gaps which need to be further studied.Comment: Requirements modeling, Requirements analysis, Self-adaptive systems, Systematic literature review, Thematic stud