Modellierung in der Lehre an Hochschulen: Thesen und Erfahrungen

Zusammenfassung: Nicht erst seit Modellierung zum Modewort geworden ist, ist Modellierung ein wichtiges Thema in der Informatikausbildung. Dieser Beitrag beleuchtet in zwölf Thesen das Warum, Was, Wie viel, Wo, Wann und Wie von Modellierung in der Lehre im Rahmen informatikbezogener Studiengänge. Die Thesen basieren auf der Erfahrung des Verfassers mit einer seit über zehn Jahren gehaltenen Modellierungsvorlesung an der Universität Zürich sowie dem Gedankenaustausch mit anderen Hochschullehrerinnen und -lehrern im Rahmen der GI-Workshopreihe ,,Modellierung". Zusätzlich liefert eine Befragung von Absolventinnen und Absolventen an der Universität Zürich empirische Evidenz für eine Reihe der These

A Scenario-Based Approach to Validating and Testing Software Systems Using Statecharts

Scenarios (Use cases) are used to describe the functionality and behavior of a (software) system in a user-centered perspective. As scenarios form a kind of abstract level test cases for the system under development, the idea to use them to derive test cases for system test is quite intriguing. Yet in practice scenarios from the analysis phase are seldom used to create concrete system test cases. In this paper we present a procedure to create scenarios in the analysis phase and use those scenarios in system test to systematically determine test cases. This is done by formalization of scenarios into statecharts, annotation of statecharts with helpful information for test case creation/generation and by path traversal in the statecharts to determine concrete test cases

GARUSO: a gamification approach for involving stakeholders outside organizational reach in requirements engineering

Stakeholder participation is a key success factor of Requirements Engineering (RE). Typically, the techniques used for identifying and involving stakeholders in RE assume that stakeholders can be identified among the members of the organizations involved when a software system is ordered, developed or maintained—and that these stakeholders can be told or even mandated to contribute. However, these assumptions no longer hold for many of today’s software systems where significant stakeholders (in particular, end-users and people affected by a system) are outside organizational reach: They are neither known nor can they easily be identified in the involved organizations nor can they be told to participate in RE activities. We have developed the GARUSO approach to address this problem. It uses a strategy for identifying stakeholders outside organizational reach and a social media platform that applies gamification for motivating these stakeholders to participate in RE activities. In this article, we describe the GARUSO approach and report on its empirical evaluation. We found that the identification strategy attracted a crowd of stakeholders outside organizational reach to the GARUSO platform and motivated them to participate voluntarily in collaborative RE activities. From our findings, we derived a first set of design principles on how to involve stakeholders outside organizational reach in RE. Our work expands the body of knowledge on crowd RE regarding stakeholders outside organizational reach

What Works Better? A Study of Classifying Requirements

Classifying requirements into functional requirements (FR) and non-functional ones (NFR) is an important task in requirements engineering. However, automated classification of requirements written in natural language is not straightforward, due to the variability of natural language and the absence of a controlled vocabulary. This paper investigates how automated classification of requirements into FR and NFR can be improved and how well several machine learning approaches work in this context. We contribute an approach for preprocessing requirements that standardizes and normalizes requirements before applying classification algorithms. Further, we report on how well several existing machine learning methods perform for automated classification of NFRs into sub-categories such as usability, availability, or performance. Our study is performed on 625 requirements provided by the OpenScience tera-PROMISE repository. We found that our preprocessing improved the performance of an existing classification method. We further found significant differences in the performance of approaches such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation, Biterm Topic Modeling, or Naive Bayes for the sub-classification of NFRs.Comment: 7 pages, the 25th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering (RE'17

A Study about the Knowledge and Use of Requirements Engineering Standards in Industry

Context: The use of standards is considered a vital part of any engineering discipline. So one could expect that standards play an important role in Requirements Engineering (RE) as well. However, little is known about the actual knowledge and use of RE-related standards in industry. Objective: In this article, we investigate to which extent standards and related artifacts such as templates or guidelines are known and used by RE practitioners. Method: To this end, we have conducted an questionnaire-based online survey. We could analyze the replies from 90 RE practitioners using a combination of closed and open-text questions. Results: Our results indicate that the knowledge and use of standards and related artifacts in RE is less widespread than one might expect from an engineering perspective. For example, about 45\% of the respondents working as requirements engineers or business analysts do not know at least one of the two core standard in RE. Participants in our study mostly use standards by personal decision rather than being imposed by their respective company, customer, or regulator. Beyond insufficient knowledge, we also found cultural and organizational factors impeding the widespread adoption of standards in RE. Conclusions: Overall, our results provide empirically informed insights into the actual use of standards and related artifacts in RE practice and - indirectly - about the value that the current standards create for RE practitioners.Comment: Preprint accepted for publication at IEEE Transactions on Software Engineerin

Towards bridging the communication gap between consumers and providers in the cloud

The number of available cloud services has recently grown considerably. Therefore, consumers demand new methods for choosing the appropriate cloud services for their needs, whereas providers require dedicated ways to correctly elicit requirements from very heterogeneous consumers. In this poster, we present the StakeCloud community platform. This will act as a cloud resources marketplace, allowing consumers to input their needs and providing them with matching cloud services. Moreover, in case the needs are not met, they can be communicated as new requirements to cloud providers. Our solution will enable easier resource identification and requirements communication in cloud systems, thus supporting both consumers and providers