Towards a modern quality framework

Quality frameworks have been used in requirements engineering (RE) for a long time to help elicit and document quality requirements. However, existing quality frameworks have major issues that hamper their applicability, particularly in RE, but also in other fields such as the design of digital systems. In this paper, we discuss the issues of existing quality frameworks and propose a new quality model, which has been designed for application as a quality framework in RE as well as in the design of digital systems. We present the rationale and requirements for our new model, introduce the model and sketch its application. Our work contributes to the improvement of quality frameworks used in RE and Digital Design.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Quality-Aware Analysis in Product Line Engineering with the Orthogonal Variability Model

Software product line engineering (SPLE) is about producing a set of similar products in a certain domain. A variability model documents the variability amongst products in a product line. The specification of variability can be extended with quality information, such as measurable quality attributes (e.g., CPU and memory consumption) and constraints on these attributes (e.g., memory consumption should be in a range of values). However, the wrong use of constraints may cause anomalies in the specification which must be detected (e.g., the model could represent no products). Furthermore, based on such quality information it is possible to carry out quality-aware analyses, i.e., the product line engineer may want to verify whether it is possible to build a product that satisfies a desired quality. The challenge for quality-aware specification and analysis is three-fold. First, there should be a way to specify quality information in variability models. Second, it should be possible to detect anomalies in the variability specification associated with quality information. Third, there should be mechanisms to verify the variability model to extract useful information, such as the possibility to build a product that fulfils certain quality conditions (e.g., is there any product that requires less than 512MB of memory?). In this article, we present an approach for quality-aware analysis in software product lines using the orthogonal variability model (OVM) to represent variability. We propose to map variability represented in the OVM associated with quality information to a constraint satisfaction problem and to use an off-the-shelf constraint programming solver to automatically perform the verification task. To illustrate our approach, we use a product line in the automotive domain which is an example that was created in a national project by a leading car company. We have developed a prototype tool named FaMa-OVM, which works as a proof of concepts. We were able to identify void models, dead and false optional elements, and check whether the product line example satisfies quality conditions

Physical activity to improve cognition in older adults: can physical activity programs enriched with cognitive challenges enhance the effects? A systematic review and meta-analysis

: EPHPP quality rating scores (DOCX 38 kb

Towards a New Understanding of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises in Requirements Engineering Research

[Context and motivation] Almost worldwide the software industry mainly consists of small and medium software enterprises. From a requirements engineering perspective these companies are poorly researched. [Problem] Though RE research is discovering SMEs as an interesting field, it is difficult to categorize and distinguish these companies sufficiently. This leads to a) weakly classified results of observational studies as well as field studies and empirical research and b) insufficient mappings between methodical improvements and the companies they can be applied to. Therefore, it is hard for researchers and enterprises to adopt RE state of the art to an enterprises environment. [Principal ideas] After defining the problem, initial ideas for attributes classifying SMEs are presented and a way for improving and clustering these attributes is shown. [Contribution] This paper raises an important problem statement for RE research and shows an initial way towards solving this problem