90 research outputs found
TT-RecS: The Taxonomic Trace Recommender System
Traditional trace links are established directly between source and target
artefacts. This requires that the target artefact exists when the trace is
established. We introduce the concept of indirect trace links between a source
artefact and a knowledge organization structure, e.g. a taxonomy. This allows
the creation of links (we call them taxonomic traces) before target artefacts
are created. To gauge the viability of this concept and approach, we developed
a prototype, TT-RecS, that allows to create such trace links either manually or
with the help of a recommender system.Comment: IEEE Seventh International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for
Requirements Engineering (AIRE 2020
Requirements Quality Assurance in Industry: Why, What and How?
Context and Motivation: Natural language is the most common form to specify
requirements in industry. The quality of the specification depends on the
capability of the writer to formulate requirements aimed at different
stakeholders: they are an expression of the customer's needs that are used by
analysts, designers and testers. Given this central role of requirements as a
mean to communicate intention, assuring their quality is essential to reduce
misunderstandings that lead to potential waste. Problem: Quality assurance of
requirement specifications is largely a manual effort that requires expertise
and domain knowledge. However, this demanding cognitive process is also
congested by trivial quality issues that should not occur in the first place.
Principal ideas: We propose a taxonomy of requirements quality assurance
complexity that characterizes cognitive load of verifying a quality aspect from
the human perspective, and automation complexity and accuracy from the machine
perspective. Contribution: Once this taxonomy is realized and validated, it can
serve as the basis for a decision framework of automated requirements quality
assurance support.Comment: Conference proceedings of Requirements Engineering: Foundation for
Software Quality (REFSQ) 2017: 77-8
Process Improvement Archaeology: What Led Us Here, and What's Next?
While in every organization corporate culture and history change over time,
intentional efforts to identify performance problems are of particular interest
when trying to understand the current state of an organization. The results of
past improvement initiatives can shed light on the evolution of an organization
and represent, with the advantage of perfect hindsight, a learning opportunity
for future process improvements. The opportunity to test this premise occurred
in an applied research collaboration with the Swedish Transport Administration,
the government agency responsible for the planning, implementation, and
maintenance of long-term rail, road, shipping, and aviation infrastructure in
Sweden. This article is part of a theme issue on Process Improvement
Software Engineering Knowledge Areas in Startup Companies: A Mapping Study
Background - Startup companies are becoming important suppliers of innovative
and software intensive products. The failure rate among startups is high due to
lack of resources, immaturity, multiple influences and dynamic technologies.
However, software product engineering is the core activity in startups,
therefore inadequacies in applied engineering practices might be a significant
contributing factor for high failure rates. Aim - This study identifies and
categorizes software engineering knowledge areas utilized in startups to map
out the state-of-art, identifying gaps for further research. Method - We
perform a systematic literature mapping study, applying snowball sampling to
identify relevant primary studies. Results - We have identified 54 practices
from 14 studies. Although 11 of 15 main knowledge areas from SWEBOK are
covered, a large part of categories is not. Conclusions - Existing research
does not provide reliable support for software engineering in any phase of a
startup life cycle. Transfer of results to other startups is difficult due to
low rigor in current studies.Comment: Proceedings 6th International Conference on Software Business (ICSOB
2015), Braga, Portugal, 245-25
Use and evaluation of simulation for software process education: a case study
Software Engineering is an applied discipline and concepts are difficult to
grasp only at a theoretical level alone. In the context of a project management
course, we introduced and evaluated the use of software process simulation
(SPS) based games for improving students' understanding of software development
processes. The effects of the intervention were measured by evaluating the
students' arguments for choosing a particular development process. The
arguments were assessed with the Evidence-Based Reasoning framework, which was
extended to assess the strength of an argument. The results indicate that
students generally have difficulty providing strong arguments for their choice
of process models. Nevertheless, the assessment indicates that the intervention
of the SPS game had a positive impact on the students' arguments. Even though
the illustrated argument assessment approach can be used to provide formative
feedback to students, its use is rather costly and cannot be considered a
replacement for traditional assessments.Comment: European Conference Software Engineering Education (ECSEE), pp. 1-15,
Seeon Monastery, Germany (2014
Which Requirements Artifact Quality Defects are Automatically Detectable? A Case Study
[Context] The quality of requirements engineering artifacts, e.g.
requirements specifications, is acknowledged to be an important success factor
for projects. Therefore, many companies spend significant amounts of money to
control the quality of their RE artifacts. To reduce spending and improve the
RE artifact quality, methods were proposed that combine manual quality control,
i.e. reviews, with automated approaches. [Problem] So far, we have seen various
approaches to automatically detect certain aspects in RE artifacts. However, we
still lack an overview what can and cannot be automatically detected.
[Approach] Starting from an industry guideline for RE artifacts, we classify
166 existing rules for RE artifacts along various categories to discuss the
share and the characteristics of those rules that can be automated. For those
rules, that cannot be automated, we discuss the main reasons. [Contribution] We
estimate that 53% of the 166 rules can be checked automatically either
perfectly or with a good heuristic. Most rules need only simple techniques for
checking. The main reason why some rules resist automation is due to imprecise
definition. [Impact] By giving first estimates and analyses of automatically
detectable and not automatically detectable rule violations, we aim to provide
an overview of the potential of automated methods in requirements quality
control.Comment: 2017 25th International Requirements Engineering Conference Workshops
(REW) (pp. 400-406
Monitoring and Maintenance of Telecommunication Systems: Challenges and Research Perspectives
In this paper, we present challenges associated with monitoring and
maintaining a large telecom system at Ericsson that was developed with high
degree of component reuse. The system constitutes of multiple services,
composed of both legacy and modern systems that are constantly changing and
need to be adapted to changing business needs. The paper is based on firsthand
experience from architecting, developing and maintaining such a system,
pointing out current challenges and potential avenues for future research that
might contribute to addressing them.Comment: Proceedings KKIO Software Engineering Conference 2018: 166-17
MultiDimEr: a multi-dimensional bug analyzEr
Background: Bugs and bug management consumes a significant amount of time and
effort from software development organizations. A reduction in bugs can
significantly improve the capacity for new feature development. Aims: We
categorize and visualize dimensions of bug reports to identify accruing
technical debt. This evidence can serve practitioners and decision makers not
only as an argumentative basis for steering improvement efforts, but also as a
starting point for root cause analysis, reducing overall bug inflow. Method: We
implemented a tool, MultiDimEr, that analyzes and visualizes bug reports. The
tool was implemented and evaluated at Ericsson. Results: We present our
preliminary findings using the MultiDimEr for bug analysis, where we
successfully identified components generating most of the bugs and bug trends
within certain components. Conclusions: By analyzing the dimensions provided by
MultiDimEr, we show that classifying and visualizing bug reports in different
dimensions can stimulate discussions around bug hot spots as well as validating
the accuracy of manually entered bug report attributes used in technical debt
measurements such as fault slip through.Comment: TechDebt@ICSE 2022: 66-7
A Taxonomy for Requirements Engineering and Software Test Alignment
Requirements Engineering and Software Testing are mature areas and have seen
a lot of research. Nevertheless, their interactions have been sparsely explored
beyond the concept of traceability. To fill this gap, we propose a definition
of requirements engineering and software test (REST) alignment, a taxonomy that
characterizes the methods linking the respective areas, and a process to assess
alignment. The taxonomy can support researchers to identify new opportunities
for investigation, as well as practitioners to compare alignment methods and
evaluate alignment, or lack thereof. We constructed the REST taxonomy by
analyzing alignment methods published in literature, iteratively validating the
emerging dimensions. The resulting concept of an information dyad characterizes
the exchange of information required for any alignment to take place. We
demonstrate use of the taxonomy by applying it on five in-depth cases and
illustrate angles of analysis on a set of thirteen alignment methods. In
addition, we developed an assessment framework (REST-bench), applied it in an
industrial assessment, and showed that it, with a low effort, can identify
opportunities to improve REST alignment. Although we expect that the taxonomy
can be further refined, we believe that the information dyad is a valid and
useful construct to understand alignment
- …