7,756 research outputs found
Rationale Management Challenges in Requirements Engineering
Rationale and rationale management have been playing an increasingly prominent role in software system development mainly due to the knowledge demand during system evaluation, maintenance, and evolution, especially for large and complex systems. The rationale management for requirements engineering, as a commencing and critical phase in software development life cycle, is still under-exploited. In this paper, we first survey briefly the state-of-the-art on rationale employment and applications in requirements engineering. Secondly, we identify the challenges in integrating rationale management in requirements engineering activities in order to promote further investigations and define a research agenda on rationale management in requirements engineering.
Using Ontologies for the Design of Data Warehouses
Obtaining an implementation of a data warehouse is a complex task that forces
designers to acquire wide knowledge of the domain, thus requiring a high level
of expertise and becoming it a prone-to-fail task. Based on our experience, we
have detected a set of situations we have faced up with in real-world projects
in which we believe that the use of ontologies will improve several aspects of
the design of data warehouses. The aim of this article is to describe several
shortcomings of current data warehouse design approaches and discuss the
benefit of using ontologies to overcome them. This work is a starting point for
discussing the convenience of using ontologies in data warehouse design.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure
Semantics of trace relations in requirements models for consistency checking and inferencing
Requirements traceability is the ability to relate requirements back to stakeholders and forward to corresponding design artifacts, code, and test cases. Although considerable research has been devoted to relating requirements in both forward and backward directions, less attention has been paid to relating requirements with other requirements. Relations between requirements influence a number of activities during software development such as consistency checking and change management. In most approaches and tools, there is a lack of precise definition of requirements relations. In this respect, deficient results may be produced. In this paper, we aim at formal definitions of the relation types in order to enable reasoning about requirements relations. We give a requirements metamodel with commonly used relation types. The semantics of the relations is provided with a formalization in first-order logic. We use the formalization for consistency checking of relations and for inferring new relations. A tool has been built to support both reasoning activities. We illustrate our approach in an example which shows that the formal semantics of relation types enables new relations to be inferred and contradicting relations in requirements documents to be determined. The application of requirements reasoning based on formal semantics resolves many of the deficiencies observed in other approaches. Our tool supports better understanding of dependencies between requirements
Assisting software architects in architectural decision-making using Quark
Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) and constraints are among the principal drivers of architectural decision-making. NFRs are improved or damaged by architectural decisions (ADs), while constraints directly include or exclude parts of the architecture (e.g., logical components or technologies). We may determine the impact of an AD, or which parts of the architecture are affected by a constraint, but at the end it is hard to know if we are respecting the NFRs and the imposed constraints with all the ADs made. In the usual approach, architects use their own experience to produce software architectures
that comply with the NFRs and imposed constraints, but at the end, especially for crucial decisions, the architect has to deal with complex trade-offs between NFRs and juggle with possible incompatibilities raised by the imposed constraints. In this paper we present Quark, a method to assist software architects in architectural decision-making, and the conceptualization of the relationship between NFRs and ADs defined in Arteon, an ontology to represent and manage architectural knowledge. Finally, we provide an overview of the Quark and Arteon implementation, the ArchiTech tool.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Microservice Transition and its Granularity Problem: A Systematic Mapping Study
Microservices have gained wide recognition and acceptance in software
industries as an emerging architectural style for autonomic, scalable, and more
reliable computing. The transition to microservices has been highly motivated
by the need for better alignment of technical design decisions with improving
value potentials of architectures. Despite microservices' popularity, research
still lacks disciplined understanding of transition and consensus on the
principles and activities underlying "micro-ing" architectures. In this paper,
we report on a systematic mapping study that consolidates various views,
approaches and activities that commonly assist in the transition to
microservices. The study aims to provide a better understanding of the
transition; it also contributes a working definition of the transition and
technical activities underlying it. We term the transition and technical
activities leading to microservice architectures as microservitization. We then
shed light on a fundamental problem of microservitization: microservice
granularity and reasoning about its adaptation as first-class entities. This
study reviews state-of-the-art and -practice related to reasoning about
microservice granularity; it reviews modelling approaches, aspects considered,
guidelines and processes used to reason about microservice granularity. This
study identifies opportunities for future research and development related to
reasoning about microservice granularity.Comment: 36 pages including references, 6 figures, and 3 table
ICS Materials. Towards a re-Interpretation of material qualities through interactive, connected, and smart materials.
The domain of materials for design is changing under the influence of an increased technological
advancement, miniaturization and democratization. Materials are becoming connected,
augmented, computational, interactive, active, responsive, and dynamic. These are ICS
Materials, an acronym that stands for Interactive, Connected and Smart. While labs around the
world are experimenting with these new materials, there is the need to reflect on their
potentials and impact on design. This paper is a first step in this direction: to interpret and
describe the qualities of ICS materials, considering their experiential pattern, their expressive sensorial dimension, and their aesthetic of interaction. Through case studies, we analyse and classify these emerging ICS Materials and identified common characteristics, and challenges, e.g. the ability to change over time or their programmability by the designers and users. On that basis, we argue there is the need to reframe and redesign existing models to describe ICS materials, making their qualities emerge
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