Designing Dynamic Decision Support for Electronic Requirements Negotiations

Decision support in software development is particularly important for requirements negotiations to help assessing requirements and their different implementation alternatives. Changes related to requirements are likely, which impede decision making. To keep an overview of the assessment of requirements and to keep this assessment up-to-date throughout a software development project, flexible decision support processes are needed. In this paper, we design interactive dynamic decision support, which can handle changes related to requirements dynamically. The designed support component is compared to two state-of-the-art approaches for decision support in requirements negotiations

Managing Incremental Development: Combining Flexibility and Control

The current demand for flexible software development makes software development organizations consider iterative and incremental development approaches as alternatives to the classical waterfall software development model. This, however, may jeopardize process visibility and manageability as well as product quality. Therefore, modern software development organizations need to find ways to install flexible development processes without sacrificing project overview and control. This paper reports experiences from a real life project that used timeboxing as the basic organizing principle in an incremental and iterative design and construction process. The project’s experiences show that such a process is indeed both flexible and manageable but that it requires periodic planning and replanning, explicit concern for coordination and synchronization activities, high process discipline and organizational readiness to accept fluctuating requirements

Supporting the Everyday Work of Scientists: Automating Scientific Workflows

This paper describes an action research project that we undertook with National Research Council Canada (NRC) scientists. Based on discussions about their \ud difficulties in using software to collect data and manage processes, we identified three requirements for increasing research productivity: ease of use for end- \ud users; managing scientific workflows; and facilitating software interoperability. Based on these requirements, we developed a software framework, Sweet, to \ud assist in the automation of scientific workflows. \ud \ud Throughout the iterative development process, and through a series of structured interviews, we evaluated how the framework was used in practice, and identified \ud increases in productivity and effectiveness and their causes. While the framework provides resources for writing application wrappers, it was easier to code the applications’ functionality directly into the framework using OSS components. Ease of use for the end-user and flexible and fully parameterized workflow representations were key elements of the framework’s success. \u

Definition and Representation of Requirement Engineering/Management : A Process-Oriented Approach

Requirements are important in software development, product development, projects, processes, and systems. However, a review of the requirements literature indicates several problems. First, there is confusion between the terms ?requirements engineering? and ?requirements management.? Similarities and/or differences between the two terms are resolved through a literature review; resulting in comprehensive definitions of each term. Second, current literature recognizes the importance of requirements but offers few methodologies or solutions for defining and managing requirements. Hence, a flexible methodology or framework is provided for defining and managing requirements. Third, requirements methodologies are represented in various ways, each with their respective strengths and weaknesses. A tabular view and hybrid graphical view for representing the requirements process are provided

Quality Evaluation in Agile Process: A First Approach

In recent years, it has been given much importance to the use of models and quality standards on software development processes. Because these are those that facilitate continuous improvement and enable companies to provide higher quality products to its customers by increasing their competitive level. Today, software development is based on agile processes that allow production characterized by its changing requirements and the need for continuous customer deliveries environments. Thus it is imperative to provide companies with tools for assessing the quality of these cycles agile processes. QuAM is presented in this article, an approach to design a model of quality, integrated and flexible, that assesses the quality development cycles based on the principles and practices of the agile approach.XIII Workshop Ingeniería de Software (WIS).Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Quality Evaluation in Agile Process: A First Approach

In recent years, it has been given much importance to the use of models and quality standards on software development processes. Because these are those that facilitate continuous improvement and enable companies to provide higher quality products to its customers by increasing their competitive level. Today, software development is based on agile processes that allow production characterized by its changing requirements and the need for continuous customer deliveries environments. Thus it is imperative to provide companies with tools for assessing the quality of these cycles agile processes. QuAM is presented in this article, an approach to design a model of quality, integrated and flexible, that assesses the quality development cycles based on the principles and practices of the agile approach.XIII Workshop Ingeniería de Software (WIS).Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Control System Design Philosophy for Effective Operations and Maintenance

A well-designed control system facilitates the functions of machine operation, maintenance and development. In addition, the overall effectiveness of the control system can be greatly enhanced by providing reliable mechanisms for coordination and communication, ensuring that these functions work in concert. For good operability, the information presented to operators should be consistent, easy to understand and customizable. A maintainable system is segmented appropriately, allowing a broken element to be quickly identified and repaired while leaving the balance of the system available. In a research and development environment, the control system must meet the frequently changing requirements of a variety of customers. This means the system must be flexible enough to allow for ongoing modifications with minimal disruptions to operations. Beyond the hardware and software elements of the control system, appropriate workflow processes must be in place to maximize system uptime and allow people to work efficiently. Processes that provide automatic electronic communication ensure that information is not lost and reaches its destination in a timely fashion. This paper discusses how these control system design and quality issues have been applied at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.Comment: ICALEPCS 200

Applying System Families Concepts to Requirements Engineering Process Definition

In this paper, some experiences gained during the definition of a unified, common software development process for several companies in Telvent are presented. Last year, Telvent made the decision of developing a unique software development process which was flexible enough to be adapted to specific practices and needs of the different companies. In this paper we focus mainly on the experiences gained during the definition of the requirements engineering process, al-though many of them are also applicable to other software development processes. One of the most interesting experiences from our point of view is that, al-though the definition process was started using a top-down approach and well-know techniques like data flow diagrams, we eventually end up applying requirements engineering techniques like glossaries, scenarios or conflict resolu-tion for the definition of the requirements engineering process itself. On the other hand, the need of having adaptable processes for the different companies in Tel-vent made us adopt a process family approach, i.e. adopting an approach similar to the system families development, thus defining a core process that could be adapted to specific needs of specific companies in a predefined, controlled man-ner. The experiences gained in the definition of the process family were applied to the definition of requirements engineering process for product line development, which is briefly presented in this paper.Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC 2000–1106–C02–01Ministerio de Energía, Turismo y Agenda Digital ITEA ip00004Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad Eureka Σ! 202

Development of Research Administration and Management System for Higher Education Institutions in Developing Countries: Case Study of Durban University of Technology

Research information management has become an essential activity for higher education institutions (HEIs) worldwide as a mechanism to aggregate, curate, utilize and improve the transparency of information about research. It has led to the evolution of proprietary software systems for administering and managing research information in HEIs. However, the literature reveals that most proprietary software systems are usually inflexible, costly to maintain and do not adequately satisfy the dynamic requirements of HEIs in developing countries. Consequently, the demand for current information systems is to incorporate a high degree of formalism into software development processes to produce correct, flexible, usable and cost-effective systems. This paper reports on the development of a web-based research administration and management system (RAMS) that addresses pertinent issues associated with research information management in the context of HEIs in developing countries. The Zermelo-Fraenkel specification language has been utilized to formally specify the requirements of RAMS in close collaboration with the intended users who evaluated its usability. The overall results of the usability evaluation show that RAMS is effective, useful, easy to use, learnable and satisfactory

Understanding and supporting large-scale requirements management

Large market-driven software companies face new challenges in requirements engineering and management that emerged due to their recent extensive growth. At the same time, the pressure generated by competitors’ and users’ expectations demands being more competitive, creative and flexible to more quickly respond to a rapidly changing market situation. In the pursuit of staying competitive in this context, new ideas on how to improve the current software engineering practice are requested to help maintaining the engineering efficiency while coping with growing size and complexity of requirements engineering processes and their products. This thesis focuses on understanding and supporting large-scale requirements management for developing software products to open markets. In particular, this thesis focuses on the following requirements management activities in the mentioned context, namely: scope management, variability management and requirements consolidation. The goals of the research effort in this thesis are to provide effective methods in supporting mentioned requirements management activities in a situation when the size of them and their complexity require large time and skills efforts. Based on empirical research, where both quantitative and qualitative approaches were utilized, this thesis reports on possible improvements for managing variability and presents visualization techniques to assist scope management for large-scale software product development contexts. Both reported ideas are empirically evaluated in case studies in a large-scale context. Additionally, the benefits of using linguistic methods for requirements consolidation are investigated in a replicated experimental study based on a relevant industry scenario