Missing Requirements Information and its Impact on Software Architectures: A Case Study

[Context & motivation] In the development of large, software-intensive systems, the system’s requirements are seldom, if ever, concluded upon prior to commencing with systems architecture. Research shows that, in order to manage development and domain complexities, instances of requirements engineering (RE) and systems architecting (SA) processes tend to inter-weave. [Question/problem] However, missing requirements information can cause one to create (or recreate) the needed information during different SA activities. While backtracking in the software development process is known to be costly, the costs associated with missing requirements in the SA process have not been investigated empirically. [Principal ideas/results] We thus conducted a case study where we investigated to what extent requirements or requirements attributes’ information found missing during the SA process and impact of those missing information on SA in terms of effort. The study involved five architecting teams that involve final year undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in the university course on SA, working on architecting a system falls under “banking” domain. Our result shows that, architects did find requirements and requirements attributes’ information missing while architecting. Among requirements information, architects found that, system functionality information, constraints information and system interaction (users/systems) information are missing in requirements at higher percentages. Within requirements’ attributes, architects found requirements priority, dependency and rationale missing at higher percentages. It is also found that, out of total time spent on architecting the system, effort given to recreate missing requirements information is higher for group3 (21.5%), group1 (18%), and group2 (17%) other than group4 (12.37%) and group5(10.18%). [Contribution] The anticipated benefits of the findings are, it can motivate researchers to venture into other areas of software engineering (such as coding, testing, maintenance, etc.) from the view point of missing requirements information and its impact on those areas. This knowledge could help software practitioners to decide what kind of information need to take care of, during RE process, that could possibly ease SA process and later development phases. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first work which focuses on, to what extent requirements and requirements’ attributes information found missing during SA; characteristics and impact of those requirements missing information on SA process in terms of effort

A design theory for requirements mining systems

Software requirements are often communicated in unstructured text documents, which need to be analyzed in order to identify and classify individual needs. This process is referred to as requirements mining in the context of this thesis. It is known to be time-consuming and error-prone when performed manually by a requirements engineer. Thus, there is a demand to support requirements mining through information technology. However, little research has been conducted to conceptualize theoretically grounded requirements mining systems and abstract the necessary design knowledge in a theory. Furthermore, existing works scarcely investigate the effect of these artifacts on requirements engineers’ productivity. Consequently in this thesis, the following research question is addressed: How can a system be designed which aims at improving requirements mining productivity over manual discovery? Following a Design Science approach, a design theory is derived consisting of design requirements, design principles and design features. Design requirements are identified based on general knowledge and kernel theories. Subsequently they are related to design principles which are finally mapped to design features of an artifact. The artifact is conceptualized in two design cycles, each resulting in a distinct artifact version and its evaluation. In the first design cycle a simulation is conducted to investigate the interplay of the preliminary design principles. In the second design cycle, the effects of the final design principles on requirements mining productivity are measured in an experiment. The thesis contributes to the design theory body of knowledge by providing a design theory for requirements mining systems. The theory is a contribution to the information systems literature because requirements mining systems represent an important class of design situations that have not been adequately described yet by existing works. From a practical point of view, the study addresses the need of requirements engineers to support their work by information technology and provides vendors of requirements engineering software packages guidelines to improve their products

Forschungsbericht Universität Mannheim 2010 / 2011

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