A taxonomy of asymmetric requirements aspects

The early aspects community has received increasing attention among researchers and practitioners, and has grown a set of meaningful terminology and concepts in recent years, including the notion of requirements aspects. Aspects at the requirements level present stakeholder concerns that crosscut the problem domain, with the potential for a broad impact on questions of scoping, prioritization, and architectural design. Although many existing requirements engineering approaches advocate and advertise an integral support of early aspects analysis, one challenge is that the notion of a requirements aspect is not yet well established to efficaciously serve the community. Instead of defining the term once and for all in a normally arduous and unproductive conceptual unification stage, we present a preliminary taxonomy based on the literature survey to show the different features of an asymmetric requirements aspect. Existing approaches that handle requirements aspects are compared and classified according to the proposed taxonomy. In addition,we study crosscutting security requirements to exemplify the taxonomy's use, substantiate its value, and explore its future directions

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

A practical approach to goal modelling for time-constrained projects

Goal modelling is a well known rigorous method for analysing problem rationale and developing requirements. Under the pressures typical of time-constrained projects its benefits are not accessible. This is because of the effort and time needed to create the graph and because reading the results can be difficult owing to the effects of crosscutting concerns. Here we introduce an adaptation of KAOS to meet the needs of rapid turn around and clarity. The main aim is to help the stakeholders gain an insight into the larger issues that might be overlooked if they make a premature start into implementation. The method emphasises the use of obstacles, accepts under-refined goals and has new methods for managing crosscutting concerns and strategic decision making. It is expected to be of value to agile as well as traditional processes

Multi-perspective requirements engineering for networked business systems: a framework for pattern composition

How business and software analysts explore, document, and negotiate requirements for enterprise systems is critical to the benefits their organizations will eventually derive. In this paper, we present a framework for analysis and redesign of networked business systems. It is based on libraries of patterns which are derived from existing Internet businesses. The framework includes three perspectives: Economic value, Business processes, and Application communication, each of which applies a goal-oriented method to compose patterns. By means of consistency relationships between perspectives, we demonstrate the usefulness of the patterns as a light-weight approach to exploration of business ideas

Software reliability and dependability: a roadmap

Shifting the focus from software reliability to user-centred measures of dependability in complete software-based systems. Influencing design practice to facilitate dependability assessment. Propagating awareness of dependability issues and the use of existing, useful methods. Injecting some rigour in the use of process-related evidence for dependability assessment. Better understanding issues of diversity and variation as drivers of dependability. Bev Littlewood is founder-Director of the Centre for Software Reliability, and Professor of Software Engineering at City University, London. Prof Littlewood has worked for many years on problems associated with the modelling and evaluation of the dependability of software-based systems; he has published many papers in international journals and conference proceedings and has edited several books. Much of this work has been carried out in collaborative projects, including the successful EC-funded projects SHIP, PDCS, PDCS2, DeVa. He has been employed as a consultant t

Combined automotive safety and security pattern engineering approach

Automotive systems will exhibit increased levels of automation as well as ever tighter integration with other vehicles, traffic infrastructure, and cloud services. From safety perspective, this can be perceived as boon or bane - it greatly increases complexity and uncertainty, but at the same time opens up new opportunities for realizing innovative safety functions. Moreover, cybersecurity becomes important as additional concern because attacks are now much more likely and severe. However, there is a lack of experience with security concerns in context of safety engineering in general and in automotive safety departments in particular. To address this problem, we propose a systematic pattern-based approach that interlinks safety and security patterns and provides guidance with respect to selection and combination of both types of patterns in context of system engineering. A combined safety and security pattern engineering workflow is proposed to provide systematic guidance to support non-expert engineers based on best practices. The application of the approach is shown and demonstrated by an automotive case study and different use case scenarios.EC/H2020/692474/EU/Architecture-driven, Multi-concern and Seamless Assurance and Certification of Cyber-Physical Systems/AMASSEC/H2020/737422/EU/Secure COnnected Trustable Things/SCOTTEC/H2020/732242/EU/Dependability Engineering Innovation for CPS - DEIS/DEISBMBF, 01IS16043, Collaborative Embedded Systems (CrESt

A prescriptive approach to qualify and quantify customer value for value-based requirements engineering

Recently, customer-based product development is becoming a popular paradigm. Customer expectations and needs can be identified and transformed into requirements for product design with the help of various methods and tools. However, in many cases, these models fail to focus on the perceived value that is crucial when customers make the decision of purchasing a product. In this paper, a prescriptive approach to support value-based requirements engineering (RE) is proposed, describing the foundations, procedures and initial applications in the context of RE for commercial aircraft. An integrated set of techniques, such as means-ends analysis, part-whole analysis and multi-attribute utility theory is introduced in order to understand customer values in depth and width. Technically, this enables identifying the implicit value, structuring logically collected statements of customer expectations and performing value modelling and simulation. Additionally, it helps to put in place a system to measure customer satisfaction that is derived from the proposed approach. The approach offers significant potential to develop effective value creation strategies for the development of new product