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

Non-functional requirements: size measurement and testing with COSMIC-FFP

The non-functional requirements (NFRs) of software systems are well known to add a degree of uncertainty to process of estimating the cost of any project. This paper contributes to the achievement of more precise project size measurement through incorporating NFRs into the functional size quantification process. We report on an initial solution proposed to deal with the problem of quantitatively assessing the NFR modeling process early in the project, and of generating test cases for NFR verification purposes. The NFR framework has been chosen for the integration of NFRs into the requirements modeling process and for their quantitative assessment. Our proposal is based on the functional size measurement method, COSMIC-FFP, adopted in 2003 as the ISO/IEC 19761 standard. Also in this paper, we extend the use of COSMIC-FFP for NFR testing purposes. This is an essential step for improving NFR development and testing effort estimates, and consequently for managing the scope of NFRs. We discuss the merits of the proposed approach and the open questions related to its design

MS

thesisClimate change is projected to modify the hydrologic cycle across scales, but the relative impact climate change will have on water resources systems compared to other influencing factors remains uncertain. The performance of water storage reservoirs, for example, will not only be altered by climate-change-modified precipitation, runoff, evaporation, and transpiration, but also by additional factors such as water demand. Using a case study set in the western United States, this thesis presents an investigation of the relative importance of climate change modified hydrologic processes and water demand on reservoir feasibility. A modeling framework comprised of a river system model (MODSIM-DSS) and a precipitation (rainfall and snowfall) driven runoff model (Snowmelt Runoff Model) was created, calibrated and validated for the White River watershed and river system in northwest Colorado and northeast Utah. After validation, a proposed reservoir in the Utah segment of the White River was inserted into the modeling system. Based on climate change projections of impacts to hydrologic processes, scenarios reflecting climate change modified precipitation, temperature, and evaporation were defined and combined with a future water demand scenario including energy development and urban growth requirements. The scenarios were analyzed with the modeling system to quantify the relative impact of the altered hydrologic processes and increased water demand on reservoir feasibility. The results showed a reduction in precipitation has a greater effect than the projected increase in temperature and evaporation on the inflows to the proposed reservoir and performance of the reservoir. For a 7 percent decrease of precipitation there was an 8 percent reduction in runoff volume over a simulated ten-year period. This decrease was shown to have the greatest impact on the amount of water stored in the reservoir and the amount readily available for downstream use. In a simulation of the combined effects of precipitation, temperature and evaporation modification the reservoir was found to be impacted significantly with insufficient storage to meet downstream demands. Although significant, the impacts of the climate change modified hydrologic processes on reservoir feasibility were found to be insignificant compared to the impacts of future water demands

Early Quantitative Assessment of Non-Functional Requirements

Non-functional requirements (NFRs) of software systems are a well known source of uncertainty in effort estimation. Yet, quantitatively approaching NFR early in a project is hard. This paper makes a step towards reducing the impact of uncertainty due to NRF. It offers a solution that incorporates NFRs into the functional size quantification process. The merits of our solution are twofold: first, it lets us quantitatively assess the NFR modeling process early in the project, and second, it lets us generate test cases for NFR verification purposes. We chose the NFR framework as a vehicle to integrate NFRs into the requirements modeling process and to apply quantitative assessment procedures. Our solution proposal also rests on the functional size measurement method, COSMIC-FFP, adopted in 2003 as the ISO/IEC 19761 standard. We extend its use for NFR testing purposes, which is an essential step for improving NFR development and testing effort estimates, and consequently for managing the scope of NFRs. We discuss the advantages of our approach and the open questions related to its design as well

RS4AAL: A Process for Specifying and Analyzing Non-Functional Requirements in Ambient Assisted Living Systems

Context: The increasing life expectancy of the world’s population is a reality, and combined with sharply declining birth rates, these advances in life expectancy could lead to a rapidly aging population around the world. Technologies such as Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) can provide services that enable older people to live independently, safely and healthily. During system development, it is important to ensure good specification of Non-Functional Requirements (NFR). These are requirements that define how the system will behave in certain situations and may impact the end goal of the software if not considered during the analysis and development of the project. Aims: To meet and identify all the needs and functions provided to the users of the system, this article provides a process for specifying and analyzing nonfunctional requirements in Ambient Assisted Living, called RS4AAL, which helps the requirements engineer to specify and analyze the important requirements in the development of this system by capturing the requirements with techniques such as storytelling, reuse, and legal requirements. Results: Based on systematic mapping, key nonfunctional requirements for the Health and Care in Life subdomain were identified, as well as some legal requirements that may impact system development. Conclusions: A key finding is that the personal context of older people, legal requirements such as ISO/PRF TS 823042, and AAL Guidelines for Ethics, Data Privacy and Security directly affect the specification of non-functional requirements and the design of systems. The RS4AAL helps with this mapping by showing the requirements engineer what to consider when designing AAL systems

A Holistic Quality Evaluation, Selection and Improvement Approach driven by Multilevel Goals and Strategies

Organizations should establish business goals and check for their achievement in a systematic and disciplined way. In order to know if a business goal is achieved, it should be necessary to consider information need goals that also can require satisfying measurement and evaluation goals at operational level. Furthermore, if measurement and evaluation goals are not aligned with top-level business goals such as tactical or strategic level goals, the organization could waste its effort and resources. Usually, the different goals established in an organization are operationalized through projects. For a given project, strategies should be used in order to help in the goal achievement. A strategy defines a set of activities and methods to be followed for a specific goal purpose. Ultimately, to engineering all these issues in a systematic way, organizations should adopt a holistic evaluation approach supported by a set of integrated strategies. By means of a systematic literature review as research method, we have observed that very few approaches support integrated strategies and multilevel goals. To bridge this gap, we have developed a holistic quality multilevel and multipurpose evaluation approach that ties together multilevel goals, projects and integrated strategies. As contributions, this paper discusses an enhanced conceptual base (specified by ontologies) for linking business and information need goal concepts with project, strategy and nonfunctional requirements concepts. Then, it defines the step by step of our holistic quality evaluation approach, by listing the necessary activities to establish goals and projects at different organizational levels. Lastly, it specifies and illustrates evaluation scenarios for business/information need goal purposes such as understanding, improving, monitoring and controlling, comparing and selecting entities, which are supported by strategies and strategy patterns.Fil: Rivera, María Belén. Universidad Nacional de la Pampa. Facultad de Ingeniería; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Becker, Pablo Javier. Universidad Nacional de la Pampa. Facultad de Ingeniería; ArgentinaFil: Olsina, Luis Antonio. Universidad Nacional de la Pampa. Facultad de Ingeniería; ArgentinaFil: Papa, María Fernanda. Universidad Nacional de la Pampa. Facultad de Ingeniería; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Management and Services

Management in all business areas and organisational activities are the acts of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives. Service is intangible, therefore, it is not too easy to define the theory application in varieties of service industries. Service Management usually incorporates automated systems along with skilled labour; it also provides service development. Due to enormous demand of service industries and management development, the book under the title "Management and Services" would create a milestone in management arena for all categories of readers including Business Administration, Engineering and Architecture. This book covers educational service development, service-oriented-architecture and case research analysis, including theory application in network security, GRID technology, integrated circuit application. The book is comprised of five chapters and has been divided into two parts. Part A contains chapters on service development in educational institutions and it depicts the application of supply chain management concept in service industries like tertiary educational institutions and multiple ways of web 2.0 applications transforming learning patterns and pathways. To understand the subject in a practical manner, Part B of this book consists of noteworthy case studies and research papers on management and services and represents theory application of Data mining, Fuzzy Cluster, Game theory, GRID Technology, simulation of Operational Amplifier and Current Controlled Conveyor II in network security, architecture, and integrated circuit application

Ethical Challenges of the Industry: Are Graduates Prepared?

Hospitality graduates often enter their first jobs unaware of the difficult ethical dilemmas they will face. By having ethics teaching in a curriculum, the authors of this article believe that the perceptions of ethics of senior hospitality students at Northern Arizona University were comparable to those of operating industry managers

Toward the Design and Implementation of Traceability Engineering Tool Support

Requirements of a system keep on changing based on the need of stakeholders or the system developers, making requirement engineering an important aspect in software development. This develops a need for appropriate requirement change management. The importance of requirements traceability is defining relationships between the requirements and artefacts extracted by the stakeholder during the software development life-cycle and gives vital information to encourage software understanding. In this paper, we have concentrated on developing a tool for requirement traceability that can be used to extend the requirement elicitation and identification of system-wide qualities using the notion of quality attribute scenarios to capture the non-functional requirements. It allows us to link the functional and non-functional requirements of the system based on the quality attribute scenarios template proposed by the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI). Apart from this, the paper focuses on tracing the functional and non-functional requirements of the system using the concept of requirement traceability matrix