Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications

Modelchecking non-functional requirements for interface specifications.

In this paper we present a combination of formal specification and mechanical analysis enabling a simple and flexible development process for interface specifications from requirements. Using the potential of temporal logic for describing non-functional requirements we derive an analysis model from functional requirements. Slightly abusing its original object-oriented incentives we employ the precision and modularity of formal specification in Object-Z for representing interface descriptions. A structure preserving translation of Object-Z specifications to the model checker SMV unifies the temporal logic specification of requirements with the analysis model. The automated verification in SMV supports a feedback loop for a stepwise improvement of the requirement specification and its analysis model. We illustrate this technique on the case study of the safety-critical TWIN elevator system

Modelling non-functional requirements

We present in this paper the language NoFun for stating component quality in the framework of the ISO/IEC quality standards. The language consists of three different parts. In the first one, software quality characteristics and attributes are defined, probably in a hierarchical manner. As part of this definition, abstract quality models can be formulated and further refined into more specialised ones. In the second part, values are assigned to component quality basic attributes. In the third one, quality requirements can be stated over components, both context-free (universal quality properties) and context-dependent (quality properties for a given framework-software domain, company, project, etc.). Last, we address to the translation of the language to UML, using its extension mechanisms for capturing the fundamental non-functional concepts.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

An approach for comparison of architecture level change impact analysis methods and their relevance in web systems evolution

Change impact analysis (CIA) methods have been developed to identify the consequences of making changes to system artifacts and to support decision making with regards to that change. There is a growing body of research on CIA methods that specifically addresses changes and their impacts at a system architecture level. Most of the methods have been developed and validated on software system domain. However, there is little research consensus on: (i) the features that architectural CIA methods should comprehensively address; and (ii) which existing methods are comparatively suitable in a particular system domain such as Web systems. This paper presents a comparison approache that offer guidance on the selection of the most appropriate method for CIA activity and suitability of these methods in the context of Web systems. © 2009 IEEE

Developing a requirements management toolset: Lessons learned

Requirements Engineering (RE) is a multi-faceted discipline involving various methods, techniques and tools. RE researchers and practitioners are emphasizing the importance of having an integrated RE process. The need for an integrated toolset to support the effective management of such an integrated RE process cannot be over-emphasized. Tools integration has been identified as an important next step toward the future of requirements management tools. This paper reports on some of the significant architectural and technical issues encountered and the lessons learned in the process of developing an integrated Requirements Management (RM) Toolset: PARsed Natural language Input Processor (PARSNIP) by integrating various independent tools. This paper provides insights on architectural and technological issues typical of these types of projects, the approaches and techniques used to address the architectural mismatches and the technological incompatibilities

Visual language representation for use case evolution and traceability

The primary goal of this research is to assist non-technical stakeholders involved in requirements engineering with a comprehensible method for managing changing requirements within a specific domain. An important part of managing evolving requirements over time is to maintain a temporal ordering of the changes and to support traceability of the modifications. This research defines a semi-formal syntactical and semantic definition of such a method using a visual language, RE/TRAC (Requirements Evolution with Traceability), and a supporting formal semantic notation RE/TRAC-SEM. RE/TRAC-SEM is an ontological specification employing a combination of models, including verbal definitions, set theory and a string language specification RE/TRAC-CF. The language RE/TRAC-CF enables the separation of the syntactical description of the visual language from the semantic meaning of the model, permitting varying target representations and taking advantage of existing efficient parsing algorithms for context-free grammars. As an application of the RE/TRAC representation, this research depicts the hierarchical step-wise refinement of UML use case diagrams to demonstrate evolving system requirements. In the current arena of software development, where systems are described using platform independent models (PIMs) which emphasize the front-end design process, requirements and design documents, including the use cases, have become the primary artifacts of the system. Therefore the management of requirements’ evolution has become even more critical in the creation and maintenance of systems

Workshop on Modelling of Objects, Components, and Agents, Aarhus, Denmark, August 27-28, 2001

This booklet contains the proceedings of the workshop Modelling of Objects, Components, and Agents (MOCA'01), August 27-28, 2001. The workshop is organised by the CPN group at the Department of Computer Science, University of Aarhus, Denmark and the "Theoretical Foundations of Computer Science" Group at the University of Hamburg, Germany. The papers are also available in electronic form via the web pages: http://www.daimi.au.dk/CPnets/workshop01