Alignment of requirements and services with user feedback

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.It is widely acknowledged that software reuse reduces the cost and effort of software development. Over the years many solutions have emerged that propose methodologies to support software reusability. Service oriented software engineering (SOSE) advocates software reuse while aiming to achieve better alignment of software solutions to business requirements. Service orientation has evolved from Object Oriented Analysis and Design (OOAD) and Component Based Software Development (CBSD), the major difference being that reusable artefacts are in the form of services rather than objects or packaged components. Although SOSE is considered a new architectural style of software development that addresses some of the shortcomings of previous approaches, it has also inherited some of the challenges of CBSD, and OOAD, in particular in the requirements engineering process. In Service Oriented Requirements Engineering (SORE) an analyst has an additional challenging task of aligning requirements and services to select the optimally matched service from an increasingly large set of available online services. Much of the existing empirical research in SORE has focused mainly on the technical aspects while the human related issues are yet to be fully explored and addressed. The lack of empirical evidence to investigate the human related issues in SORE provides the overall motivation for the research covered in this thesis. User involvement in software development has been the focus of significant research and has been intuitively and axiomatically accepted to play a positive role in users’ satisfaction thus leading to system success. More recently, past users’ feedback, reviews and comments from online sources are considered a form of user involvement. These offer valuable information to assist analysts in increasing their knowledge for making more informed decision for service selection. In service oriented paradigm the full extent of the benefits of this form of user involvement has not been empirically investigated. This thesis addresses three important high level research goals: (1) to investigate and identify the most important challenges of SORE, (2) to design an innovative and flexible method to address the top challenge of SORE, focusing specifically on the important relationship between user involvement and system success, and (3) to evaluate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed method in an empirical study. This thesis presents research conducted in three parts for achieving each of the stated goals respectively: problem analysis, solution analysis and implementation analysis. For problem analysis a mixed method approach is used, i.e. literature review, quantitative online survey, and qualitative industrial interview study. For solution analysis a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is conducted to analyse the existing empirical studies about the relationship between user involvement and system success. Inspired by the results of this SLR, I designed the ARISE (Alignment of RequIrement and SErvices) method, following Situational Method Engineering to make it flexible for adoption in various project contexts. The ARISE method aims to exploit the benefits of experiences of past users for service selection. For implementation analysis, the ARISE method was instantiated in a case study with real life data with two objectives in mind: (1) validation of the effectiveness of ARISE in overcoming the challenges of alignment, and (2) improvement and refinement of the ARISE method. Analysis of the results of this validation revealed the need for automated tool support for the ARISE method. This automation is achieved through the design and implementation of software tools created for supporting the analysts in service selection. The systematic and mixed method research approach of the problem analysis phase identified that alignment of requirements and services was the top challenge for practitioners in SORE. It also increased our understanding of why this alignment is considered the most challenging task. The findings of the SLR confirmed that the effective user involvement in software development in general, and in requirements engineering in particular could lead to system success. In SORE, the past users of services can be involved through their feedback and sentiments about the services from online sources. These concepts were the basis for the design of the ARISE method. The results of the case study complemented by the experimentation with the automated tools revealed that past users’ feedback and sentiments are indeed valuable sources of information that can assist analysts in overcoming the challenges of alignment between requirements and services thus making a more informed decision in service selection

Users' voice and service selection: An empirical study

© 2014 IEEE. Service Oriented software development saves time by reusing existing services and integrates them to create a new system. But selecting a service that satisfies the requirements of all concerned stakeholders is a challenging task. The situation has been exacerbated within the past few years with huge number of services available that offer similar functionalities where the analysts require additional information for making better decision for service selection. User feedback analysis has recently gained a lot of attention for its potential benefits in various areas of requirements engineering. The aim of this research is to evaluate the impact of feedback provided by the end users of the services, on the decision making process for the service selection. In this paper we present an empirical study that utilizes user feedback analysis for selection of a service among 92 available services with similar functionalities. The results show that in scenarios with significant number of services, it is helpful for analysts to consider additional information to select optimally best matched service to the requirements

A systematic review on the relationship between user involvement and system success

© 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Context: For more than four decades it has been intuitively accepted that user involvement (UI) during system development lifecycle leads to system success. However when the researchers have evaluated the user involvement and system success (UI-SS) relationship empirically, the results were not always positive. Objective: Our objective was to explore the UI-SS relationship by synthesizing the results of all the studies that have empirically investigated this complex phenomenon. Method: We performed a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) following the steps provided in the guidelines of Evidence Based Software Engineering. From the resulting studies we extracted data to answer our 9 research questions related to the UI-SS relationship, identification of users, perspectives of UI, benefits, problems and challenges of UI, degree and level of UI, relevance of stages of software development lifecycle (SDLC) and the research method employed on the UI-SS relationship. Results: Our systematic review resulted in selecting 87 empirical studies published during the period 1980-2012. Among 87 studies reviewed, 52 reported that UI positively contributes to system success, 12 suggested a negative contribution and 23 were uncertain. The UI-SS relationship is neither direct nor binary, and there are various confounding factors that play their role. The identification of users, their degree/level of involvement, stage of SDLC for UI, and choice of research method have been claimed to have impact on the UI-SS relationship. However, there is not sufficient empirical evidence available to support these claims. Conclusion: Our results have revealed that UI does contribute positively to system success. But it is a double edged sword and if not managed carefully it may cause more problems than benefits. Based on the analysis of 87 studies, we were able to identify factors for effective management of UI alluding to the causes for inconsistency in the results of published literature

Polymorphism in biomineral nanoparticles

Biomineralisation is the process by which living things produce hard mineral tissues with unique physical properties. The study of this process can help us produce biomimetic materials, reproducing such properties, with the study of nucleation and crystallisation of the materials being particularly important. I have used molecular simulation techniques to help gain a greater understanding of these processes, focussing particularly on identifying the conformations and solid phases available to nanoparticles of two biomineral compounds. The bones and teeth of mammals are made largely of calcium phosphates. I have used metadynamics to study nanoparticles of tricalcium phosphate (TCP) and have identified high and lower order configurations. To facilitate this work I reviewed the extant empirical potentials for calcium phosphate systems, selecting the most appropriate for TCP. Calcium carbonate, found in examples throughout the animal kingdom, has three crystalline polymorphs relevant to biomineralisation: calcite, aragonite and vaterite. While nanoparticles of calcite have been extensively studied the other polymorphs have been neglected to date. In this work I present a technique for predicting crystalline morphologies for all three polymorphs across a range of sizes, and compare the energetic ordering. In water the energetic ordering of the nanoparticles is heavily dependent on nanoparticle size. Furthermore, I present work calculating the surface enthalpies of a variety of calcium carbonate surfaces, many of which are negative. It appears that entropic penalty of ordered water is key to understanding the stability of nanocrystals. Also presented is an application of the nudged elastic band method to study transitions between nanoparticle crystal conformations. Between all three crystal polymorphs the nanoparticles passed through an amorphous region of phase space. These results have also been used to evaluate order parameters for use in metadynamics simulations

KM-SORE: Knowledge Management for Service Oriented Requirements Engineering

Service-oriented Software Engineering is a new style for creating software using reusable services which are available over the web. The biggest challenge in this process is to discover and select the appropriate services that match system requirements. Currently, none of the proposed approach has been accepted by research community as a standard. There is very little empirical work available that addresses requirements engineering in service oriented paradigm. The aim of this study is to propose a framework for requirements engineering in SOSE. The framework is based on a new idea, that integrating Knowledge Management in Service Oriented development would improve requirement engineering phase as it does for traditional software engineering. The framework is developed in the light of the issues and challenges identified by published literature and the feedback of practitioners and researchers working on service oriented projects

Systematic reviews in requirements engineering: A tertiary study

© 2014 IEEE. There has been an increasing interest in conducting Systematic Literature Reviews (SLR) among Requirements Engineering (RE) researchers in recent years. However, so far there have been no tertiary studies conducted to provide a comprehensive overview of these published SLR in RE. In this paper we present a tertiary study of SLR that focus solely on RE related topics by following the guidelines of Evidence Based Software Engineering. We have conducted both automated search of major online sources and manual search of the RE and SLR related conferences and journals. Our tertiary study has identified 53 distinct systematic reviews published from 2006 to 2014 and reported in 64 publications. We have assessed the resulting SLR for their quality, and coverage of specific RE related topics thus identifying some gaps. We have observed that the quality of SLR in RE has been decreasing over the recent years. There is a strong need to replicate some of these SLR to increase the reliability of their results for future RE research

Empirical study of communication structures and barriers in geographically distributed teams

Conway's law asserts that communication structures of organisations constrain the design of the products they develop. This law is more explicitly observable in geographically distributed contexts because distributed teams are required to share information across different time zones and barriers. The diverse business processes and functions adopted by individual teams in geographically distributed settings create challenges for effective communication. Since the publication of Conway's law, a significant body of research has emerged in its relation to the communication structures. When it comes to software projects, the explicit observation about Conway's law has produced mixed results. The research reported in this study explores the communication structures and corresponding challenges faced by teams within a large geographically distributed software development organisation. The data was collected from relevant documents, a questionnaire and interviews with relevant stakeholders. The findings suggest that Conway's law is observable within the communication structures of globally distributed software development teams. The authors have identified the barriers and challenges of effective communications in this setting and have investigated the benefits of utilising an integrated system to overcome these challenges

What makes service oriented requirements engineering challenging? A qualitative study

The focus of Service Oriented Software Development (SOSD) is to develop software by integrating reusable services to lower the required cost, time and effort of development and increase reusability, agility, quality and customer satisfaction. It has been recognised in the literature that SOSD faces various challenges especially in requirements engineering (RE). The objective of this study is to investigate these challenges of Service Oriented RE (SORE) from practitioners' perspectives in order to gain a deeper understanding of the related issues and to reveal potential gaps between research and practice in SORE. They present a qualitative study of the challenges and issues in SORE. The data were collected by conducting interviews with practitioners working in IT companies in Sydney, who have had substantial experience with service oriented software projects. The authors findings reveal that most of the challenges of SORE are similar to those that are faced during RE in traditional or component-based software development. According to the practitioners, the research and practice has made some advances in the technical direction but the human related issues in SORE have not been addressed adequately. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2014

Evidence in Requirements Engineering: A Systematic Literature Review Protocol

Requirements Engineering (RE) is recognized as one of the critical phases in software development. RE has its own journals and conferences where lots of work has been published. As the area is maturing, increasingly large numbers of empirically supported studies have been reported in RE. There is a need to synthesize evidence based RE literature. We plan to systematically investigate evidence based RE studies to see and report state of the art in evidence based RE reported research. This paper aims at providing a systematic literature review (SLR) protocol to describe a process for synthesizing the empirically supported work in the area of RE that will eventually present a state of the art of the field. This SLR intends to not only summarize the empirical data regarding RE but will also be helpful for various practitioners in this field to find out areas of RE rich in terms of tools, techniques, frameworks, models and guidelines to aid in their work. It will also facilitate RE researchers to identify knowledge gaps to recognize needs and chances for future research directions in this field