The Influence of Green Strategies Design onto Quality Requirements Prioritization

[Context and Motivation] Modern society is facing important challenges that are critical to improve its environmental performance. The literature reports on many green strategies aimed at reducing energy consumption. However, little research has been carried out so far on including green strategies in software design. [Question/problem] In this paper, we investigate how green software strategies can contribute to, and influence, quality requirements prioritization performed iteratively throughout a service-oriented software design process. [Methodology] In collaboration with a Dutch industry partner, an empirical study was carried out with 19 student teams playing the role of software designers, who completed the design of a real-life project through 7 weekly deliverables. [Principle ideas/results] We identified a list of quality requirements (QRs) that were considered by the teams as part of their architectural decisions when green strategies were introduced. By analyzing relations between QRs and green strategies, our study confirms usability as the most used QR for addressing green strategies that allow to create people awareness. Qualities like reliability, performance, interoperability, scalability and availability emerged as the most relevant for addressing service-awareness green strategies. [Contribution] If used at the beginning of a green software project, our results help including the most relevant QRs for addressing those green software strategies that are e.g. the most domain-generic (like increase carbon footprint awareness, paperless service provisioning, virtualization)

Characterizing the contribution of quality requirements to software sustainability

Most respondents considered modifiability as relevant for addressing both technical and environmental sustainability. Functional correctness, availability, modifiability, interoperability and recoverability favor positively the endurability of software systems. This study has also identified security, satisfaction, and freedom from risk as very good contributors to social sustainability. Satisfaction was also considered by the respondents as a good contributor to economic sustainability. Background Since sustainability became a challenge in software engineering, researchers mainly from requirements engineering and software architecture communities have contributed to defining the basis of the notion of sustainability-aware software. Problem Despite these valuable efforts, the assessment and design based on the notion of sustainability as a software quality is still poorly understood. There is no consensus on which sustainability requirements should be considered. Aim and Method To fill this gap, a survey was designed with a double objective: i) determine to which extent quality requirements contribute to the sustainability of software-intensive systems; and ii) identify direct dependencies among the sustainability dimensions. The survey involved different target audiences (e.g. software architects, ICT practitioners with expertise in Sustainability). We evaluated the perceived importance/relevance of each sustainability dimension, and the perceived usefulness of exploiting a sustainability model in different software engineering activities. Result

Experimental Study Using Functional Size Measurement in Building Estimation Models for Software Project Size

This paper reports on an experiment that investigates the predictability of software project size from software product size. The predictability research problem is analyzed at the stage of early requirements by accounting the size of functional requirements as well as the size of non-functional requirements. The experiment was carried out with 55 graduate students in Computer Science from Concordia University in Canada. In the experiment, a functional size measure and a project size measure were used in building estimation models for sets of web application development projects. The results show that project size is predictable from product size. Further replications of the experiment are, however, planed to obtain more results to confirm or disconfirm our claim

Research Findings on Empirical Evaluation of Requirements Specifications Approaches

Numerous software requirements specification (SRS) approaches have been proposed in software engineering. However, there has been little empirical evaluation of the use of these approaches in specific contexts. This paper describes the results of a mapping study, a key instrument of the evidence-based paradigm, in an effort to understand what aspects of SRS are evaluated, in which context, and by using which research method. On the basis of 46 identified and categorized primary studies, we found that understandability is the most commonly evaluated aspect of SRS, experiments are the most commonly used research method, and the academic environment is where most empirical evaluation takes place

Experiences and social impact in the application of requirements engineering in the development of an intelligent platform

Rural Community Tourism (RCT) is an activity that contributes to the economic, social and sustainable development of a country in rural areas. In this research, the goal is to develop an intelligent platform (IP) to meet the needs of different participants in RCT. It presents the experience of focusing on requirements engineering, going through different iterations where a SWOT analysis was performed, while using extreme programming, complying with ISO 25010, etc. The accurate identification of requirements is essential for the implementation and usability of the platform to have a social impact on the direct participants

Experiences in Using Practitioner’s Checklists to Evaluate the Relevance of Experiments Reported in Requirements Engineering

Background: Requirements Engineering (RE) researchers recognize that for RE methods to be adopted in industry, practitioners should be able to evaluate the relevance of a study to their practice. Kitchenham et al proposed a set of perspective-based checklists, which demonstrated to be a useful instrument for this purpose. Specifically, the checklist from the practitioner’s perspective seems to be a good candidate for evaluating the relevance of RE studies to RE practice. However, little is known about the applicability of the checklist to the area of RE. Moreover, this checklist also requires a greater analysis about its reliability. Aim: The aim of this report is to propose a perspective-based checklist to the RE community that allows evaluating the relevance of experimental studies in RE from the practitioner’s/consultant’s viewpoint. Method: Our research followed an iterative design-science based approach in which we first analyzed the problems with a previously published checklist and developed an operationalized proposal for a new checklist to counter these problems. We performed a reliability evaluation of this new checklist. The research was performed with two practitioners and 24 papers that report experimental results on comprehensibility of software requirements specifications. Results: This report gives first-hand experiences of practitioners in evaluating the relevance of primary studies in RE, by using a perspective-based checklist. With respect to the reliability of the adjusted checklist, 9 of out 19 questions show an acceptable proportion of agreement (between two practitioners). Conclusions: Based on our experience, the contextualization and operationalization of a perspective-based checklist helps to make it more useful for the practitioners. However, to increase the reliability of the checklist, more reviewers are required and more discussion cycles are necessary. Our plan is to involve at least two more practitioners in order to improve the reliability of the practitioner checklist proposed