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.

Towards a scope management of non-functional requirements in requirements engineering

Getting business stakeholders’ goals formulated clearly and project scope defined realistically increases the chance of success for any application development process. As a consequence, stakeholders at early project stages acquire as much as possible knowledge about the requirements, their risk estimates and their prioritization. Current industrial practice suggests that in most software projects this scope assessment is performed on the user’s functional requirements (FRs), while the non-functional requirements (NFRs) remain, by and large, ignored. However, the increasing software complexity and competition in the software industry has highlighted the need to consider NFRs as an integral part of software modeling and development. This paper contributes towards harmonizing the need to build the functional behavior of a system with the need to model the associated NFRs while maintaining a scope management for NFRs. The paper presents a systematic and precisely defined model towards an early integration of NFRs within the requirements engineering (RE). Early experiences with the model indicate its ability to facilitate the process of acquiring the knowledge on the priority and risk of NFRs

IAC user manual

The User Manual for the Integrated Analysis Capability (IAC) Level 1 system is presented. The IAC system currently supports the thermal, structures, controls and system dynamics technologies, and its development is influenced by the requirements for design/analysis of large space systems. The system has many features which make it applicable to general problems in engineering, and to management of data and software. Information includes basic IAC operation, executive commands, modules, solution paths, data organization and storage, IAC utilities, and module implementation

Software security requirements management as an emerging cloud computing service

© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Emerging cloud applications are growing rapidly and the need for identifying and managing service requirements is also highly important and critical at present. Software Engineering and Information Systems has established techniques, methods and technology over two decades to help achieve cloud service requirements, design, development, and testing. However, due to the lack of understanding of software security vulnerabilities that should have been identified and managed during the requirements engineering phase, we have not been so successful in applying software engineering, information management, and requirements management principles that have been established for the past at least 25 years, when developing secure software systems. Therefore, software security cannot just be added after a system has been built and delivered to customers as seen in today's software applications. This paper provides concise methods, techniques, and best practice requirements engineering and management as an emerging cloud service (SSREMaaES) and also provides guidelines on software security as a service. This paper also discusses an Integrated-Secure SDLC model (IS-SDLC), which will benefit practitioners, researchers, learners, and educators. This paper illustrates our approach for a large cloud system Amazon EC2 service

Modeling and Performance Considerations for Automated Fault Isolation in Complex Systems

The purpose of this paper is to document the modeling considerations and performance metrics that were examined in the development of a large-scale Fault Detection, Isolation and Recovery (FDIR) system. The FDIR system is envisioned to perform health management functions for both a launch vehicle and the ground systems that support the vehicle during checkout and launch countdown by using suite of complimentary software tools that alert operators to anomalies and failures in real-time. The FDIR team members developed a set of operational requirements for the models that would be used for fault isolation and worked closely with the vendor of the software tools selected for fault isolation to ensure that the software was able to meet the requirements. Once the requirements were established, example models of sufficient complexity were used to test the performance of the software. The results of the performance testing demonstrated the need for enhancements to the software in order to meet the demands of the full-scale ground and vehicle FDIR system. The paper highlights the importance of the development of operational requirements and preliminary performance testing as a strategy for identifying deficiencies in highly scalable systems and rectifying those deficiencies before they imperil the success of the projec

Automating the management of software projects in a developing IT economy

Software project management is the control of the transformation of users’ requirements and resources into a successful software result (product). This work automates the management of software projects in an emerging IT economy like Nigeria. It also explores the simulation of management practices such as configuration management and risk management. The COCOMO II model was employed for the estimation process, while the Risk Model from The American Systems Corporation (ASC) was used for risk management. Experimental data was obtained from AcadSoft Solutions, Calabar, Unical Computer Centre, and OmegaBiz.ng Software Solutions & Consultancy, Calabar. The resultant network-based software tool was developed on object-oriented technology using Java. The study established that good management practices may still be applied by the Nigerian software industry that lacks expertise in software management. Multi-site development approach facilitates large projects by using simple network-based application that aids collaboration among team members. Future research could extend to system and real-time software projects, to give a holistic picture of software project management in developing countries

Multi-site software engineering ontology instantiations management using reputation based decision making

In this paper we explore the development of systems for software engineering ontology instantiations management in the methodology for multi-site distributed software development. Ultimately the systems facilitate collaboration of teams in multi-site distributed software development. In multi-site distributed environment, team members in the software engineering projects have naturally an interaction with each other and share lots of project data/agreement amongst themselves. Since theyare not always residing at the same place and face-to-face meetings hardly happen, there is a need for methodology and tools that facilitate effective communication for efficient collaboration. Whist multi-site distributed teams collaborate, there are a lot of shared project data updated or created. In a large volume of project data, systematic management is of importance. Software engineering knowledge is represented in the software engineering ontology whose instantiations, which are undergoing evolution, need a good management system. Software engineering ontology instantiations signify project information which is shared and has evolved to reflect project development, changes in the software requirements or in the design process, to incorporate additional functionality to systems or to allow incremental improvement, etc

Automating the management of software projects in a developing it economy

Software project management is the control of the transformation of users’ requirements and resources into a successful software result (product). This work automates the management of software projects in an emerging IT economy like Nigeria. It also explores the simulation of management practices such as configuration management and risk management. The COCOMO II model was employed for the estimation process, while the Risk Model from The American Systems Corporation (ASC) was used for risk management. Experimental data was obtained from AcadSoft Solutions, Calabar, Unical Computer Centre, and OmegaBiz.ng Software Solutions & Consultancy, Calabar. The resultant network-based software tool was developed on object-oriented technology using Java. The study established that good management practices may still be applied by the Nigerian software industry that lacks expertise in software management. Multi-site development approach facilitates large projects by using simple network-based application that aids collaboration among team members. Future research could extend to system and real-time software projects, to give a holistic picture of software project management in developing countries