Requirements: The Key to Sustainability

Software's critical role in society demands a paradigm shift in the software engineering mind-set. This shift's focus begins in requirements engineering. This article is part of a special issue on the Future of Software Engineering

A Study on Reuse-based Requirements Engineering by Utilizing Knowledge Pattern

Software development has become an essential part of many industries over the past decade. The use of software has become an essential element for the organization to support its operation and business. Some software has certain features in common, which allow its requirements to be used repetitively in the requirement engineering phase. This paper presents a study on knowledge patterns for reuse-based requirements engineering. Reuse-based requirements engineering is saving the effort to conduct the process and, at the same time maintaining the standard since reused requirements come with its properties as well.  Software development is an iterative process itself and so does the knowledge it holds in every iteration. When analysts perform many iterations of elicitation processes, it is often the case that a significant amount of requirements is recurring and similar software system will likely benefit from them. This research adopted a literature review method to investigate and to present current studies on knowledge pattern for the purpose of reuse. Knowledge reuse by utilizing knowledge pattern is becoming a significant method in software requirements engineering as it safes the effort of developing requirements from scratch. The study found that a specific pattern is required to develop good requirements specification. A proposed prototype to deploy reuse-based requirements engineering is also presented and evaluated. Experts’ judgment method is used for evaluation by adapting the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The results showed that reusing knowledge pattern expedites the requirements elicitation process and improves the requirements quality.

Towards a kansei-based user modeling methodology for eco-design

We propose here to highlight the benefits of building a framework linking Kansei Design (KD), User Centered Design (UCD) and Eco-design, as the correlation between these fields is barely explored in research at the current time. Therefore, we believe Kansei Design could serve the goal of achieving more sustainable products by setting up an accurate understanding of the user in terms of ecological awareness, and consequently enhancing performance in the Eco-design process. In the same way, we will consider the means-end chain approach inspired from marketing research, as it is useful for identifying ecological values, mapping associated functions and defining suitable design solutions. Information gathered will serve as entry data for conducting scenario-based design, and supporting the development of an Eco-friendly User Centered Design methodology (EcoUCD).ANR-ECOUS

Contested modelling

We suggest that the role and function of expert computational modelling in real-world decision-making needs scrutiny and practices need to change. We discuss some empirical and theory-based improvements to the coupling of the modelling process and the real world, including social and behavioural processes, which we have expressed as a set of questions that we believe need to be answered by all projects engaged in such modelling.  These are based on a systems analysis of four research initiatives, covering different scales and timeframes, and addressing the complexity of intervention in a sustainability context. Our proposed improvements require new approaches for analysing the relationship between a project’s models and its publics.  They reflect what we believe is a necessary and beneficial dialogue between the realms of expert scientific modelling and systems thinking.  This paper is an attempt to start that process, itself reflecting a robust dialogue between two practitioners sat within differing traditions, puzzling how to integrate perspectives and achieve wider participation in researching this problem space.&nbsp

Participatory process management

Although the process of public and stakeholder participation continues to be intensively investigated and discussed in academic circles, the implementation of participatory methods in practice remains problematic. This can be attributed to the lack of knowledge transfer on the one hand, and the general underestimation of participatory approaches in planning processes on the other.\ud A possible solution - participatory processmanagement - is introduced in this article. Participatory process management means that all participatory activities are embedded in the overall planning activities of a project. The most significant criteria for a participatory process are identified as ’objectives’, ’constraints’ and ’process’which together forma framework for combining generally applicablemethodswith local constraints and the objectives of a project. Themain elements of the participatory management framework introduced here are levels and classes of participation and a generic process scheme includingmonitoring and evaluation of participatory processes. This work is based upon long-term experiences of consultants and scientists. However, the insights from the InterReg project TRUST are particularly valuable and confirm the hypotheses that different water management projects are comparable in terms of their participatory process performance. The participatory management framework is a step forward in closing the gap between scientific knowledge about participatory methods and their applicability in practice

A Sustainability-Driven Approach for Agile Software Requirements

The SDGs (sustainable development goals) demand for the involvement of all sectors of our society, from industry to academia. Therefore, the race towards sustainability has become increasingly more important and widely covered. Sustainability involves five different dimensions: environmental, economic, social, technical and individual. These dimensions are also of interest for software development since they have an impact not only on each other but also on the base requirements of a system. Therefore, well-informed design decisions require improved support to reason on such intra- and inter-relationships and impacts, early in the development. We are interested in reasoning about these relationships in an agile context where user stories play a major role, but do not handle sustainability requirements in a methodical way. For this purpose, our first step was to understand how developers from the agile community handled sustainability. The second step was to perform a systematic mapping study where we furthered our understanding of sustainability, and software development with agile methodologies. With this study we also gained awareness concerning any approaches that have been proposed regarding the integration of sustainability in an agile context. This study is the foundation for the third part of our work: a solution that consists in extending and adapting an existing catalogue of sustainability requirements into a catalogue of sustainability user stories for later reuse during the early stages of an agile software development process. We validated the approach with a case study (U-Bike) and performed an online survey for qualitative evaluation of the proposed approach.Os ODS (objetivos de desenvolvimento sustentável) exigem o envolvimento de todos os setores da nossa sociedade, da indústria à academia. Por isso, a corrida pela sustentabilidade tem se tornado cada vez mais importante e amplamente divulgada. A sustentabilidade envolve cinco dimensões diferentes: ambiental, econômica, social, técnica e individual. Essas dimensões também são de interesse para o desenvolvimento de software, pois impactam não apenas umas nas outras, mas também nos requisitos básicos de um sistema. Portanto, decisões de projeto bem informadas requerem suporte aprimorado para raciocinar sobre tais relacionamentos e impactos intra e inter-relacionados, logo no início do desenvolvimento. Estamos interessados em raciocinar sobre esses relacionamentos em um contexto ágil, onde as user stories desempenham um papel importante, mas não tratam os requisitos de sustentabilidade de maneira metódica. Para isso, nosso primeiro passo foi entender como os desenvolvedores da comunidade ágil lidavam com a sustentabilidade. A segunda etapa foi realizar um estudo de mapeamento sistemático onde ampliamos nosso entendimento sobre sustentabilidade e desenvolvimento de software com metodologias ágeis. Com este estudo também tomamos conhecimento de quaisquer abordagens que tenham sido propostas em relação à integração da sustentabilidade em um contexto ágil. Este estudo é a base para a terceira parte do nosso trabalho: uma solução que consiste em estender e adaptar um catálogo existente de requisitos de sustentabilidade em um catálogo de user stories de sustentabilidade para posterior reutilização durante os estágios iniciais de um processo de desenvolvimento ágil de software. Validamos a abordagem com um estudo de caso (U-Bike) e realizamos uma pesquisa online para avaliação qualitativa da abordagem proposta