Unifying Requirements and Code: an Example

Requirements and code, in conventional software engineering wisdom, belong to entirely different worlds. Is it possible to unify these two worlds? A unified framework could help make software easier to change and reuse. To explore the feasibility of such an approach, the case study reported here takes a classic example from the requirements engineering literature and describes it using a programming language framework to express both domain and machine properties. The paper describes the solution, discusses its benefits and limitations, and assesses its scalability.Comment: 13 pages; 7 figures; to appear in Ershov Informatics Conference, PSI, Kazan, Russia (LNCS), 201

Second ECOOP Workshop on Precise Behavioral Semantics (with an Emphasis on OO Business Specifications)

Business specifications are essential to describe and understand businesses (and, in particular, business rules) independently of any computing systems used for their possible automation. They have to express this understanding in a clear, precise, and explicit way, in order to act as a common ground between business domain experts and software developers. They also provide the basis for reuse of concepts and constructs ("patterns") common to all - from finance to telecommunications -, or a large number of, businesses, and in doing so save intellectual effort, time and money. Moreover, these patterns substantially ease the elicitation and validation of business specifications during walkthroughs with business customers, and support separation of concerns using viewpoints.Comment: 21 pages, 0 figure

Exploring the impact of software requirements on system-wide goals: a method using satisfaction arguments and i* goal modelling

This paper describes the application of requirements engineering concepts to support the analysis of the impact of new software systems on system-wide goals. Requirements on a new or revised software component of a socio-technical system not only have implications on the goals of the subsystem itself, but they also impact upon the goals of the existing integrated system. In industries such as air traffic management and healthcare, impacts need to be identified and demonstrated in order to assess concerns such as risk, safety, and accuracy. A method called PiLGRIM was developed which integrates means-end relationships within goal modelling with knowledge associated with the application domain. The relationship between domain knowledge and requirements, as described in a satisfaction argument, adds traceability rationale to help determine the impacts of new requirements across a network of heterogeneous actors. We report procedures that human analysts follow to use the concepts of satisfaction arguments in a software tool for i* goal modelling. Results were demonstrated using models and arguments developed in two case studies, each featuring a distinct socio-technical system – a new controlled airspace infringement detection tool for NATS (the UK's air navigation service provider), and a new version of the UK’s HIV/AIDS patient reporting system. Results provided evidence towards our claims that the conceptual integration of i* and satisfaction arguments is usable and useful to human analysts, and that the PiLGRIM impact analysis procedures and tool support are effective and scalable to model and analyse large and complex socio-technical systems

Supporting ISO 26262 with SysML, Benefits and Limits

International audienceThis article deals with the issue of deploying efficiently the ISO 26262: the new standard in automotive systems development. The directives enclosed in this norm demands the establishment of a product lifecycle fully integrating the safety assessment activities. To tackle this subject, this paper explores the way of setting up Model-Based Design methodology to express and organize the concepts manipulated during the ISO 26262 process. This attempt is founded on the use of SysML and on the creation of a profile dedicated to ISO 26262 development context. We provide an introduction to Model-Based Design paradigm and its appli-cation in a safety relevant context. An overview of ISO 26262 is given, followed by the description of an on-going project on the subject. Modeling propositions are formulated and the use of diverse SysML diagrams are mapped on the automotive safety lifecycle process

Using active database for management of requirements change

Software system development projects experience numerous changes during their life cycle. These changes are inevitable and driven by several factors including changes to a system\u27s environment and changes of customers\u27 needs. Requirements change has been reported as the major contributing factor for poor quality or even failures of software projects. This indicates that management of requirements change still remains a challenging problem in software development. A critical part of the requirements change management process is impact analysis. To carry out impact assessment, traceability information is needed. Over two decades, requirements traceability has been an important research topic in software research, but the actual practice of maintaining traceability information is not always entirely successful. In this thesis, a new traceability technique was presented for mapping dynamic behaviors of requirements into Active Databases. The technique keeps requirements and their related artifacts synchronized with respect to their states. It automatically maintains traceability links between requirements and related artifacts when a requirement is changed. This approach can not only efficiently handle basic and necessary traceability functions, but also centralize reactive behavior by using Active Database to ensure no one bypass traceability policies.Dept. of Computer Science. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2005 .G42. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 44-03, page: 1401. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2005

SysML for embedded automotive Systems: lessons learned

International audienceThis paper deals with the first lessons learned from using the SysML language to support the System Engineering activities when developing automotive embedded systems and products with a particular focus on illustrating improvement solutions that have been experimented and validated in Valeo pilot projects

Requirements Engineering

Requirements Engineering (RE) aims to ensure that systems meet the needs of their stakeholders including users, sponsors, and customers. Often consid- ered as one of the earliest activities in software engineering, it has developed into a set of activities that touch almost every step of the software development process. In this chapter, we reflect on how the need for RE was first recognised and how its foundational concepts were developed. We present the seminal papers on four main activities of the RE process, namely (i) elicitation, (ii) modelling & analysis, (iii) as- surance, and (iv) management & evolution. We also discuss some current research challenges in the area, including security requirements engineering as well as RE for mobile and ubiquitous computing. Finally, we identify some open challenges and research gaps that require further exploration

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