Knowledge Creation in Requirements Engineering – A Systematic Literature Review

Requirements engineering (RE) is crucial for software development, yet software requirements are often not properly identified or implemented. As the RE process thereby highly depends on human knowledge (explicit and tacit), this problem can in many cases be attributed to the lack of mutual understanding between customers and developers which is caused by diverging domain knowledge. To solve this problem, we conduct a systematic literature review to identify methods associated with Nonaka’s organizational knowledge creation theory. We map eight such methods on six common RE problems as we analyze to which extent the methods overcome the associated problems. Although it is not always obvious which problems apply to specific software projects, the identified methods provide an adequate first approach to reduce the risk of potential RE problems, thus making project failure less likely

Interaction-Based Creation and Maintenance of Continuously Usable Trace Links

Traceability is a major concern for all software engineering artefacts. The core of traceability are trace links between the artefacts. Out of the links between all kinds of artefacts, trace links between requirements and source code are fundamental, since they enable the connection between the user point of view of a requirement and its actual implementation. Trace links are important for many software engineering tasks such as maintenance, program comprehension, verification, etc. Furthermore, the direct availability of trace links during a project improves the performance of developers. The manual creation of trace links is too time-consuming to be practical. Thus, traceability research has a strong focus on automatic trace link creation. The most common automatic trace link creation methods use information retrieval techniques to measure the textual similarity between artefacts. The results of the textual similarity measurement is then used to judge the creation of links between artefacts. The application of such information retrieval techniques results in a lot of wrong link candidates and requires further expert knowledge to make the automatically created links usable, insomuch as it is necessary to manually vet the link candidates. This fact prevents the usage of information retrieval techniques to create trace links continuously and directly provide them to developers during a project. Thus, this thesis addresses the problem of continuously providing trace links of a good quality to developers during a project and to maintain these links along with changing artefacts. To achieve this, a novel automatic trace link creation approach called Interaction Log Recording-based Trace Link Creation (ILog) has been designed and evaluated. ILog utilizes the interactions of developers with source code while implementing requirements. In addition, ILog uses the common development convention to provide issues' identifiers in a commit message, to assign recorded interactions to requirements. Thus ILog avoids additional manual efforts from the developers for link creation. ILog has been implemented in a set of tools. The tools enable the recording of interactions in different integrated development environments and the subsequent creation of trace links. Trace link are created between source code files which have been touched by interactions and the current requirement which is being worked on. The trace links which are initially created in this way are further improved by utilizing interaction data such as interaction duration, frequency, type, etc. and source code structure, i.e. source code references between source code files involved in trace links. ILog's link improvement removes potentially wrong links and subsequently adds further correct links. ILog was evaluated in three empirical studies using gold standards created by experts. One of the studies used data from an open source project. In the two other studies, student projects involving a real world customer were used. The results of the studies showed that ILog can create trace links with perfect precision and good recall, which enables the direct usage of the links. The studies also showed that the ILog approach has better precision and recall than other automatic trace link creation approaches, such as information retrieval. To identify trace link maintenance capabilities suitable for the integration in ILog, a systematic literature review about trace link maintenance was performed. In the systematic literature review the trace link maintenance approaches which were found are discussed on the basis of a standardized trace link maintenance process. Furthermore, the extension of ILog with suitable trace link maintenance capabilities from the approaches found is illustrated

Knowledge creation and visualisation by using trade-off curves to enable set-based concurrent engineering

The increased international competition forces companies to sustain and improve market share through the production of a high quality product in a cost effective manner and in a shorter time. Set‑based concurrent engineering (SBCE), which is a core element of lean product development approach, has got the potential to decrease time‑to‑market as well as enhance product innovation to be produced in good quality and cost effective manner. A knowledge‑based environment is one of the important requ irements for a successful SBCE implementation. One way to provide this environment is the use of trade‑off curves (ToC). ToC is a tool to create and visualise knowledge in the way to understand the relationships between various conflicting design parame ters to each other. This paper presents an overview of different types of ToCs and the role of knowledge‑based ToCs in SBCE by employing an extensive literature review and industrial field study. It then proposes a process of generating and using knowledg e‑based ToCs in order to create and visualise knowledge to enable the following key SBCE activities: (1) Identify the feasible design space, (2) Generate set of conceptual design solutions, (3) Compare design solutions, (4) Narrow down the design sets, (5) Achieve final optimal design solution. Finally a hypothetical example of a car seat structure is presented in order to provide a better understanding of using ToCs. This example shows that ToCs are effective tools to be used as a knowledge sou rce at the early stages of product development process

How Do Real Options Concepts Fit in Agile Requirements Engineering?

Agile requirements engineering is driven by creating business value for the client and heavily involves the client in decision-making under uncertainty. Real option thinking seems to be suitable in supporting the client’s decision making process at inter-iteration time. This paper investigates the fit between real option thinking and agile requirements engineering. We first look into previously published experiences in the agile software engineering literature to identify (i) ‘experience clusters’ suggesting the ways in which real option concepts fit into the agile requirements process and (ii) ‘experience gaps’ and under-researched agile requirements decision-making topics which require further empirical studies. Furthermore, we conducted a cross-case study in eight agile development organizations and interviewed 11 practitioners about their decision-making process. The results suggest that options are almost always identified, reasoned about and acted upon. They are not expressed in quantitative terms, however, they are instead explicitly or implicitly taken\ud into account during the decision-making process at interiteration time

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

Software acquisition: a business strategy analysis

The paper argues that there are new insights to be gained from a strategic analysis of requirements engineering. The paper is motivated by a simple question: what does it take to be a world class software acquirer? The question has relevance for requirements engineers because for many organisations market pressures mean that software is commonly acquired rather than developed from scratch. The paper builds on the work of C. H. Fine (1998) who suggests that product, process and supply chain should be designed together, i.e., 3D concurrent engineering. Using a number of reference theories, it proposes a systematic way of carrying out 3D concurrent engineering. The paper concludes that the critical activity in supply chain design is the design of the distribution of skills and the nature of contract

Business Value Is not only Dollars - Results from Case Study Research on Agile Software Projects

Business value is a key concept in agile software development. This paper presents results of a case study on how business value and its creation is perceived in the context of agile projects. Our overall conclusion is that the project participants almost never use an explicit and structured approach to guide the value creation throughout the project. Still, the application of agile methods in the studied cases leads to satisfied clients. An interesting result of the study represents the fact that the agile process of many projects differs significantly from what is described in the agile practitioners’ books as best practices. The key implication for research and practice is that we have an incentive to pursue the study of value creation in agile projects and to complement it by providing guidelines for better client’s involvement, as well as by developing structured methods that will enhance the value-creation in a project

Review of Professional Doctorates

This review concerns the range and type of Professional Doctorates offered in Ireland and internationally. It looks at their growth, fields of study, structure of programmes and distinctions between them and the PhD