Requirements engineering: a review and research agenda

This paper reviews the area of requirements engineering. It outlines the key concerns to which attention should be devoted by both practitioners, who wish to "reengineer" their development processes, and academics, seeking intellectual challenges. It presents an assessment of the state-of-the-art and draws conclusions in the form of a research agenda

A research review of quality assessment for software

Measures were recommended to assess the quality of software submitted to the AdaNet program. The quality factors that are important to software reuse are explored and methods of evaluating those factors are discussed. Quality factors important to software reuse are: correctness, reliability, verifiability, understandability, modifiability, and certifiability. Certifiability is included because the documentation of many factors about a software component such as its efficiency, portability, and development history, constitute a class for factors important to some users, not important at all to other, and impossible for AdaNet to distinguish between a priori. The quality factors may be assessed in different ways. There are a few quantitative measures which have been shown to indicate software quality. However, it is believed that there exists many factors that indicate quality and have not been empirically validated due to their subjective nature. These subjective factors are characterized by the way in which they support the software engineering principles of abstraction, information hiding, modularity, localization, confirmability, uniformity, and completeness

Knowledge-based support in Non-Destructive Testing for health monitoring of aircraft structures

Maintenance manuals include general methods and procedures for industrial maintenance and they contain information about principles of maintenance methods. Particularly, Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) methods are important for the detection of aeronautical defects and they can be used for various kinds of material and in different environments. Conventional non-destructive evaluation inspections are done at periodic maintenance checks. Usually, the list of tools used in a maintenance program is simply located in the introduction of manuals, without any precision as regards to their characteristics, except for a short description of the manufacturer and tasks in which they are employed. Improving the identification concepts of the maintenance tools is needed to manage the set of equipments and establish a system of equivalence: it is necessary to have a consistent maintenance conceptualization, flexible enough to fit all current equipment, but also all those likely to be added/used in the future. Our contribution is related to the formal specification of the system of functional equivalences that can facilitate the maintenance activities with means to determine whether a tool can be substituted for another by observing their key parameters in the identified characteristics. Reasoning mechanisms of conceptual graphs constitute the baseline elements to measure the fit or unfit between an equipment model and a maintenance activity model. Graph operations are used for processing answers to a query and this graph-based approach to the search method is in-line with the logical view of information retrieval. The methodology described supports knowledge formalization and capitalization of experienced NDT practitioners. As a result, it enables the selection of a NDT technique and outlines its capabilities with acceptable alternatives

JWalk: a tool for lazy, systematic testing of java classes by design introspection and user interaction

Popular software testing tools, such as JUnit, allow frequent retesting of modified code; yet the manually created test scripts are often seriously incomplete. A unit-testing tool called JWalk has therefore been developed to address the need for systematic unit testing within the context of agile methods. The tool operates directly on the compiled code for Java classes and uses a new lazy method for inducing the changing design of a class on the fly. This is achieved partly through introspection, using Java’s reflection capability, and partly through interaction with the user, constructing and saving test oracles on the fly. Predictive rules reduce the number of oracle values that must be confirmed by the tester. Without human intervention, JWalk performs bounded exhaustive exploration of the class’s method protocols and may be directed to explore the space of algebraic constructions, or the intended design state-space of the tested class. With some human interaction, JWalk performs up to the equivalent of fully automated state-based testing, from a specification that was acquired incrementally

Operational specification for FCA using Z

We present an outline of a process by which operational software requirements specifications can be written for Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). The Z notation is used to specify the FCA model and the formal operations on it. We posit a novel approach whereby key features of Z and FCA can be integrated and put to work in contemporary software development, thus promoting operational specification as a useful application of conceptual structures.</p

An Evaluation of Inter-Organizational Workflow Modelling Formalisms

This paper evaluates the dynamic aspects of the UML in the context of inter-organizational workflows. Two evaluation methodologies are used. The first one is ontological and is based on the BWW (Bunge-Wand-Weber) models. The second validation is based on prototyping and consists in the development of a workflow management system in the aerospace industry. Both convergent and divergent results are found from the two validations. Possible enhancements to the UML formalism are suggested from the convergent results. On the other hand, the divergent results suggest the need for a contextual specification in the BWW models. Ce travail consiste en une évaluation des aspects dynamiques du language UML dans un contexte de workflow inter-organisationnel. Le choix du language par rapport à d'autres est motivé par sa richesse grammaticale lui offrant une très bonne adaptation à ce contexte. L'évaluation se fait par une validation ontologique basée sur les modèles BWW (Bunge-Wand-Weber) et par la réalisation d'un prototype de système de gestion de workflows inter-organisationnels. À partir des résultats convergents obtenus des deux différentes analyses, des améliorations au formalisme UML sont suggérées. D'un autre coté, les analyses divergentes suggèrent une possibilité de spécifier les modèles BWW à des contextes plus particuliers tels que ceux des workflows et permettent également de suggérer d'autres améliorations possibles au langage.Ontology, Conceptual study, Prototype Validation, UML, IS development methods and tools., Ontologie, étude conceptuelle, validation du prototype, UML, méthodes et outils de développement IS

Verifying and Monitoring IoTs Network Behavior using MUD Profiles

IoT devices are increasingly being implicated in cyber-attacks, raising community concern about the risks they pose to critical infrastructure, corporations, and citizens. In order to reduce this risk, the IETF is pushing IoT vendors to develop formal specifications of the intended purpose of their IoT devices, in the form of a Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD), so that their network behavior in any operating environment can be locked down and verified rigorously. This paper aims to assist IoT manufacturers in developing and verifying MUD profiles, while also helping adopters of these devices to ensure they are compatible with their organizational policies and track devices network behavior based on their MUD profile. Our first contribution is to develop a tool that takes the traffic trace of an arbitrary IoT device as input and automatically generates the MUD profile for it. We contribute our tool as open source, apply it to 28 consumer IoT devices, and highlight insights and challenges encountered in the process. Our second contribution is to apply a formal semantic framework that not only validates a given MUD profile for consistency, but also checks its compatibility with a given organizational policy. We apply our framework to representative organizations and selected devices, to demonstrate how MUD can reduce the effort needed for IoT acceptance testing. Finally, we show how operators can dynamically identify IoT devices using known MUD profiles and monitor their behavioral changes on their network.Comment: 17 pages, 17 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1804.0435

Information systems evaluation methodologies

Due to the prevalent use of Information Systems (IS) in modern organisations nowadays, evaluation research in this field is becoming more and more important. In light of this, a set of rigorous methodologies were developed and used by IS researchers and practitioners to evaluate the increasingly complex IS implementation used. Moreover, different types of IS and different focusing perspectives of the evaluation require the selection and use of different evaluation approaches and methodologies. This paper aims to identify, explore, investigate and discuss the various key methodologies that can be used in IS evaluation from different perspectives, namely in nature (e.g. summative vs. formative evaluation) and in strategy (e.g. goal-based, goal-free and criteria-based evaluation). The paper concludes that evaluation methodologies should be selected depending on the nature of the IS and the specific goals and objectives of the evaluation. Nonetheless, it is also proposed that formative criteria-based evaluation and summative criteria-based evaluation are currently among the most and more widely used in IS research. The authors suggest that the combines used of one or more of these approaches can be applied at different stages of the IS life cycle in order to generate more rigorous and reliable evaluation outcomes

ENCOMPASS: A SAGA based environment for the compositon of programs and specifications, appendix A

ENCOMPASS is an example integrated software engineering environment being constructed by the SAGA project. ENCOMPASS supports the specification, design, construction and maintenance of efficient, validated, and verified programs in a modular programming language. The life cycle paradigm, schema of software configurations, and hierarchical library structure used by ENCOMPASS is presented. In ENCOMPASS, the software life cycle is viewed as a sequence of developments, each of which reuses components from the previous ones. Each development proceeds through the phases planning, requirements definition, validation, design, implementation, and system integration. The components in a software system are modeled as entities which have relationships between them. An entity may have different versions and different views of the same project are allowed. The simple entities supported by ENCOMPASS may be combined into modules which may be collected into projects. ENCOMPASS supports multiple programmers and projects using a hierarchical library system containing a workspace for each programmer; a project library for each project, and a global library common to all projects