PABRE-Proj: applying patterns in requirements elicitation

© 2013 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Software requirement patterns have been proposed as a type of artifact for fostering requirements reuse. In this paper, we present PABRE-Proj, a tool aimed at supporting requirements elicitation and specification.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Personal recommendations in requirements engineering : the OpenReq approach

[Context & motivation] Requirements Engineering (RE) is considered as one of the most critical phases in software development but still many challenges remain open. [Problem] There is a growing trend of applying recommender systems to solve open RE challenges like requirements and stakeholder discovery; however, the existent proposals focus on specific RE tasks and do not give a general coverage for the RE process. [Principal ideas/results] In this research preview, we present the OpenReq approach to the development of intelligent recommendation and decision technologies that support different phases of RE in software projects. Specifically, we present the OpenReq part for personal recommendations for stakeholders. [Contribution] OpenReq aim is to improve and speed up RE processes, especially in large and distributed systemsPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Vacaciones y permisos en el ámbito del empleo público

Este trabajo tiene por objeto analizar la regulación existente a efectos de vacaciones y otros permisos en el ámbito del empleo público en España. En este caso nos remontaremos a los inicios de la regulación de los permisos y las vacaciones de los que disfrutaban los trabajadores y como han ido evolucionando estos derechos. Podremos observar cómo se han ido ampliando en la mayoría de los casos, y sobre todo, como han ido desarrollando su regulación para no dar lugar a confusión y a disputa. En definitiva, este trabajo intentará explicar cómo se han llegado a conseguir los derechos individuales de las vacaciones y permisos para los empleados públicos y que diferencias existen entre los derechos que poseen los distintos tipos de trabajadores como los funcionarios de carrera, funcionarios interinos, el personal laboral y el personal eventual…si es que las hubiese.Grado en Relaciones Laborales y Recursos Humano

Definition and use of software requirement patterns in requirements engineering activities

The final quality of software products and services depends on the requirements stated in the Software Requirements Specification (SRS). However, some problems like ambiguity, incompleteness and inconsistency, have been reported in the writing of SRS, especially when natural language is used. Requirements reuse has been proposed as a key asset for requirement engineers to efficiently elicit, validate and document software requirements, and as a consequence obtain SRS of better quality through more effective engineering processes. Among all the possible techniques to achieve reuse, patterns hold a prominent position. Although there have been several techniques proposed to reuse requirements, it may be observed that no concrete proposal has achieved a wide acceptance. Due to that, this research proposes the PABRE framework, which uses Software Requirement Patterns (SRP) as a means to capture and reuse requirements knowledge in the context of IT projects.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A catalogue of non-technical requirement patterns

© 2012 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Software Requirement Patterns (SRP) have been proposed as an artifact for fostering requirements reuse. PABRE is a framework that promotes the use of SRP as a means for requirements elicitation, validation and documentation in the context of IT procurement projects. In this paper, we present a catalogue of non-technical SRP included in the framework and present in detail some of them. We also introduce the motivation to arrive to these patterns.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Requirements reuse and requirement patterns: a state of the practice survey

Context. Requirements engineering is a discipline with numerous challenges to overcome. One of these challenges is the implementation of requirements reuse approaches. Although several theoretical proposals exist, little is known about the practices that are currently adopted in industry. Objective. Our goal is to contribute to the investigation of the state of the practice in the reuse of requirements, eliciting current practices from practitioners, and their opinions whenever appropriate. Besides reuse in general, we focus on requirement patterns as a particular strategy to reuse. Method. We conducted an exploratory survey based on an online questionnaire. We received 71 responses from requirements engineers with industrial experience in the field, which were analyzed in order to derive observations. Results. Although we found that a high majority of respondents declared some level of reuse in their projects (in particular, non-functional requirements were identified as the most similar and recurrent among projects), it is true that only a minority of them declared such reuse as a regular practice. Larger IT organizations and IT organizations with well-established software processes and methods present higher levels of reuse. Ignorance of reuse techniques and processes is the main reason preventing wider adoption. From the different existing reuse techniques, the simplest ones based on textual copy and subsequent tailoring of former requirements are the most adopted techniques. However, participants who apply reuse more often tend to use more elaborate techniques. Opinions of respondents about the use of requirement patterns show that they can be expected to mitigate problems related to the quality of the resulting requirements, such as lack of uniformity, inconsistency, or ambiguity. The main reasons behind the lack of adoption of requirement patterns by practitioners (in spite of the increasing research approaches proposed in the community) are related to the lack of a well-defined reuse method and involvement of requirement engineers.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

On the requirements engineer role

The requirements engineer role is defined differently within most organizations.This work gas been partially supported by the GENESIS project, TIN2016-79269-R. Tony Gorschek’s work has been supported by KKS Funded Software Engineering ReThought (SERT) Research Profile @ SERL-SWEDEN, BTH.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Including functional and non-technical requirements in a software requirement patterns catalogue

Taking into account the drawbacks presented above for each asset in the PABRE framework, the objectives of this thesis are: 1. Do a systematic review of the existent published works on reuse in Requirements Engineering stage, particularly on the use of patterns to achieve the reuse of requirements during Requirements Engineering. 2. Construction of a complete set of non-technical SRP that can be obtained from the Software Requirement Specifications (SRSs) corresponding to 6 real projects. 3. Study of the Content Management System domain and construction of some examples of functional SRP for this domain from the same 6 SRSs. 4. Check the validity of the current SRP metamodel for its suitability for non-technical and functional SRPs. 5. Validate the structure of SRPs (as it is the base of this thesis) and construct a survey which will be used to know what requirements engineers think about the usability of SRP catalogues in real projects in their different enterprises or organizations and if it will be applicable or not

The quest for survival after Franco: The moderate Francoists' slow journey to the polls (1964-1977).

This thesis investigates the trajectory of the moderate members of Franco's regime (known as aperturistas and reformists) over more than one decade until the arrival of democracy in 1977. These moderates, who favoured, in differing degrees, the political reform of the regime, were part of a group of actors who paved the way for the transition to democracy. The period studied ranges from 1964, the year when the Law of Associations was introduced, to 1977, the year of the first democratic elections. The thesis attempts to explain how the acceptance of a democratic system by the moderate Francoists following the dictator's death was partly the result of their early advocacy of political reform. Their reasons for advocating political reform were rooted in (i) the economic and social development experienced in Spain from the beginning of the 1960s, and (ii) their wish to avoid the dramatic break with the dictatorship (ruptura) proposed by the democratic opposition in the 1970s. The ruptura option implied the destruction of all Francoist institutions, laws, and lifestyle, and, with them, the political elimination of the moderate Francoists themselves. Their political survival became at stake after the death of Franco in 1975. From 1975, therefore, many members of the regime supported the arrival of democracy (without the Communist's participation) merely as a strategy for their political survival. But, in the case of some moderates, their participation in the process of democratising Spain was a natural step after their long-standing advocacy of reform. Important research has been done on the study of the moderate Francoists in the early 1970s, but the trajectory of their personal and political ideologies throughout the 1960s has thus far been largely neglected. During the transition process, the regime's reformists acted as a bridge between the hard-liners of the regime and a strong democratic opposition, helping King Juan Carlos, Adolfo Suarez and Torcuato Fernandez-Miranda to implement the 1976 Reform Law that swept away the old structures of the regime. The thesis shows that the ultimate importance of the regime reformist in the transition to democracy, therefore, cannot be understood in isolation. It is beyond question, however, that the lack of a group of regime reformists would have yielded a different transition process

Definition and use of software requirement patterns in requirements engineering

The final quality of software products and services depends on the requirements stated in the Software Requirements Specifications (SRSs). However, some problems like ambiguity, incompleteness and inconsistency have been reported in the writing of SRSs, especially when natural language is used. Requirements reuse has been proposed as a key asset for requirements engineers to efficiently elicit, validate and document software requirements and, as a consequence, obtain SRSs of better quality through more effective engineering processes. Among all the possible techniques to achieve reuse, patterns hold a prominent position. In their most classical form, patterns describe problems that occur over and over again, and then describe the core of the solution to these problems. Software engineering practitioners have adopted the notion of pattern in several contexts, remarkably related to software design (e.g., design patterns and software architectural patterns), but also in other software development phases, both earlier and later. Following this strategy, requirement patterns emerge as a natural way to reuse knowledge during the Requirements Engineering (RE) stage. Although there have been several techniques proposed to reuse requirements, it has been observed that no concrete proposal has achieved a wide acceptance, neither any covered all the necessary elements to encourage organizations to adopt requirements reuse. As a consequence, this thesis proposes the use of Software Requirement Patterns (SRPs) as a means to capture and reuse requirements knowledge in the context of information technology projects. Following the typical context-problem-solution structure of patterns, an SRP mainly consists of: a template (solution) that may generate one or more requirements when applied in a certain project, and some information (context-problem) to identify its applicability in that project. To facilitate their use, SRPs are encapsulated inside the PABRE (PAttern-Based Requirements Elicitation) framework. The framework covers all the elements that could be critical for the adoption of a requirements reuse technique. Specifically, the framework includes: - A metamodel that describes the structure and semantics of SRPs and their organization inside a catalogue. - An SRP catalogue composed by non-functional, non-technical and functional SRPs, the functional ones being specific for the content management system domain. - A method for guiding the use of an SRP catalogue during requirements elicitation and specification, as well as another one for constructing and updating it. - An economic model to perform cost-benefit analysis on the adoption of SRPs based on return-on-investment. - The PABRE system as technological support. In order to analyse the benefits and drawbacks of the SRPs proposed in this thesis, two empirical studies have been carried out to investigate the perception of participants about requirement patterns in general and SRPs in particular. The first one is an exploratory survey addressed to information technology people with industrial experience in RE, which analyses the current state of the practice of requirement patterns approaches. The second one corresponds to a set of semi-structured interviews, focussed on the SRP approach, conducted to requirements engineers of Swedish organizations. Moreover, as it has been discovered that there are few empirical studies showing the state of the practice of requirements reuse in industry, the first study also explores the current situation of requirements reuse practices in organizations.La qualitat final dels productes i serveis de software depèn del requisits definits en l’especificació de Requisits Software (ERS). Tot i així, alguns problemes com la ambigüitat, incompletesa i inconsistència han sigut detectats en la escriptura dels ERS, especialment quan el llenguatge natural és usat per escriure’ls. La reutilització de requisits ha sigut proposada com un recurs clau pels enginyers de requisits per tal d’obtenir, validar i documentar requisits software i, com a conseqüència, obtenir ERS de millor qualitat usant processos d’enginyeria més efectius. Entre totes les tècniques possibles per aconseguir la reutilització, els patrons tenen una posició destacada. En la seva forma més clàssica, els patrons descriuen problemes que ocorren sovint, i després descriuen la part central de la solució a aquests problemes. Els professionals de la enginyeria del software han adoptat la noció de patró en diferents àmbits, especialment en els relacionats amb el disseny del software (per exemple, els patrons de disseny i els patrons d’arquitectura del software), però també en altres etapes del desenvolupament del software, tant abans com després del seu disseny. Seguint aquesta estratègia, els patrons de requisits emergeixen com una manera natural de reutilitzar coneixement durant l’etapa d’enginyeria de requisits. Tot i que hi ha hagut varies tècniques proposades per reutilitzar requisits, s’ha observat que no hi ha cap proposta concreta que hagi aconseguit una àmplia acceptació, ni cap proposta completa que cobreixi tots els elements necessaris per animar a les organitzacions a adoptar la reutilització de requisits. Com a conseqüència, aquesta tesis proposa l’ús de Patrons de Requisits Software (en anglès Software Requirement Patterns o SRPs) com un medi per capturar i reutilitzar coneixement de requisits en l’àmbit de projectes de tecnologia de la informació. Seguint la estructura típica dels patrons de context-problema-solució, un SRP consisteix en: una plantilla (solució) que pot generar un o més requisits quan és aplicat en un projecte específic, i informació relacionada (context-problema) per identificar la seva aplicabilitat en un projecte. Per facilitar el seu ús, els SRP han sigut encapsulats dintre del framework PABRE (de l’anglès PAttern-Based Requirements Elicitation). El framework cobreix tots els elements que podrien ser crítics per adoptar una tècnica de reutilització de requisits. Més detalladament, el framework inclou: - Un meta model que descriu la estructura i semàntica dels SRPs i la seva organització dintre d’un catàleg.Postprint (published version