Regulatory Compliance-oriented Impediments and Associated Effort Estimation Metrics in Requirements Engineering for Contractual Systems Engineering Projects

Large-scale contractual systems engineering projects often need to comply with a myriad of government regulations and standards as part of contractual fulfillment. A key activity in the requirements engineering (RE) process for such a project is to elicit appropriate requirements from the regulations and standards that apply to the target system. However, there are impediments in achieving compliance due to such factors as: the voluminous contract and its high-level specifications, large number of regulatory documents, and multiple domains of the system. Little empirical research has been conducted on developing a shared understanding of the compliance-oriented complexities involved in such projects, and identifying and developing RE support (such as processes, tools, metrics, and methods) to improve overall performance for compliance projects. Through three studies on an industrial RE project, we investigated a number of issues in RE concerning compliance, leading to the following novel results:(i) a meta-model that captures artefacts-types and their compliance-oriented inter-relationships that exist in RE for contractual systems engineering projects; (ii) discovery of key impediments to requirements-compliance due to: (a) contractual complexities (e.g., regulatory requirements specified non-contiguously with non-regulatory requirements in the contract at the ratio of 1:19), (b) complexities in regulatory documents (e.g., over 300 regulatory documents being relevant to the subject system), and (c) large and complex system (e.g., 40% of the contractual regulatory requirements are cross-cutting); (iii) a method for deriving base metrics for estimating the effort needed to do compliance work during RE and demonstrate how a set of derived metrics can be used to create an effort estimation model for such work; (iv) a framework for structuring diverse regulatory documents and requirements for global product developments. These results lay a foundation in RE research on compliance issues with anticipation for its impact in real-world projects and in RE research

Guía para la integración de métodos formales de ingeniería de requerimientos en procesos de desarrollo ágil

Las Metodologías Ágiles se han convertido poco a poco en la principal elección por parte de Ingenieros de Software a la hora de llevar a cabo sus proyectos [1]. Las necesidades actuales, y el constante cambio en los negocios, convierten a este tipo de metodologías en una excelente base para gestionar y desarrollar proyectos de software, sin embargo, al igual que con los métodos más tradicionales, la gestión de proyectos que implican muchos requerimientos, hacen que el trabajo se dificulte [2]. Es por esto que se ha propuesto la adaptación de algunos métodos (normalmente utilizados en procesos formales) de la Ingeniería de Requerimientos, a través de una base teórica proporcionada por el Kernel de SEMAT.Agile methodologies have gradually become the leading choice by software engineers when carrying out their projects [1]. Current needs, and the constant change in businesses, makes this type of methodologies an excellent basis for manage and develop software projects, however, as with more traditional methods, project management involving many requirements makes difficult the software development process [2]. That is why, it is proposed the adaptation of some methods (commonly used in formal processes) of Requirements Engineering, through a theoretical basis provided by the kernel SEMAT.Ingeniero (a) de SistemasPregrad