On the engineering of systems of systems: key challenges for the requirements engineering community!

Software intensive systems of the future will be ultra large-scale systems of systems. Systems of Systems Engineering focuses on the interoperation of many independent, self-contained constituent systems to achieve a global need. The scale and complexity of systems of systems possess unique challenges for the Requirements Engineering community. Current requirements engineering techniques are inadequate in addressing these challenges and new concepts, methods, techniques, tools and processes are required. This paper identifies some immediate key challenges for the Requirements Engineering community that need to be scoped and describes some road-mapping activities that aim to address these challenges

The limitations of current decision-making techniques in the procurement of COTS software components

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002. The fundamentals of good decision-making are, first, a clear understanding of the decision itself and second the availability of properly focused information to support the decision. Decision-making techniques help with both these problems. However, the techniques should be thought of as aids to decision-making and not the substitutes for it. Numerous decision-making techniques have been proposed as effective methods of ranking software products for selection for use as components in large-scale systems. Many of these techniques have been developed and successfully applied in other arenas and have been either used directly or adapted to be applied to COTS product evaluation and selection. This paper will show that many of these techniques are not valid when applied in this manner. We will describe an alternate requirements-driven technique that could be more effective

The Design of Adaptive Acquisition of Users Feedback: an Empirical Study

Users’ feedback is a main source of knowledge on how users perceive the role of software in meeting their requirements. Collectively, such feedback helps shaping software autonomous and semi-autonomous adaptation decisions of what is called Social Adaptation. It also helps developers to identify loci in the system where an evolution should be introduced in the next release. Despite this role of users’ feedback, there is a lack of systematic engineering approaches on how to design its acquisition mechanisms. In this paper, we observe that the acquisition of feedback should be itself adaptive to the context of use . We conduct an empirical study following a mixed-method sequential exploratory approach to explore the main drivers of such adaptation and understand users’ attitude when being asked to provide feedback. Our findings are meant to enrich the knowledge base for developers and researchers in users-centric, or crowd-centric, adaptation. It also highlights areas of study for a future research in the area

Rethinking process guidance for selecting software components

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002. This paper reports the results of ongoing research into compo-nent-based software engineering (CBSE) in the European banking sector as part of the EU-funded BANKSEC project. The importance of complex non-functional requirements such as dependability and security presents new challenges for CBSE. The paper presents BANKSEC’s vision of an integrated software tool that will provide process advice for component procurement teams who are tackling these new problems. The basis for this process guidance is a situation meta-model that enables the software tool to infer properties about the current status of the selection process and recommend process guidance relevant to this situation

State of Art of the Effectiveness in Adopting Blockchain Technology-UAE Survey Study

© 2019 IEEE. The Government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is moving towards the Smart City and integrating Blockchain (BC) technology among its services to the public. In April 2018, the UAE government launched a Blockchain Strategy of 2021. Under this initiative, 50 percent of government transactions will be processed over a BC platform. Eleven billion dirhams are expected to be saved in transactions and documents prepared in the government sector. The UAE 2021 strategy includes four pillars, focusing on residence happiness, government efficiency, advanced legislation, and global entrepreneurship. In October 2016, the emirate of Dubai, launched a local BC strategy to become the first energy-powered city that leads the future economy by 2020. This motivation placed the Government of UAE as a unique and pioneered country in innovation and enabling the ecosystem to be addressed in both the public and private sectors. This strategy is based on three domains: government effectiveness, industry innovation, and international, domestic leadership. BC projects will be experimenting throughout the country in many sectors such as energy, transportation, logistics, tourism, health, education and employment, economic development, safety and justice, social services, municipal and land works. This paper study the state of art of the UAE strategy towards adopting BC technology among all its entities. A survey has been conducted to evaluate the strategic effectiveness of this new technology. The study involves a combination of 71 public and private companies that operate in the UAE. The outcome shows that there is a need to integrate this technology. At the same time, the survey concluded that 92.0% of the companies are aware of the technology. It also highlighted that 55% of companies suffer from the lack of experienced consultants and outsources their services. The survey confirmed that BC technology had been used in different industrial use cases such as supply chain (35%), Internet of things (27%), and financial transactions (25%)

Adaptive software-based Feedback Acquisition: A Persona-based design

Users’ feedback is vital to improve software quality and it provides developers with a rich knowledge on how software meets users’ requirements in practice. Feedback informs how software should adapt, or be adapted, at runtime and what evolutionary actions to take in the next release. However, studies have noted that accommodating the different preferences of users on how feedback should be requested is a complex task and requires a careful engineering process. This calls for an adaptive feedback acquisition mechanisms to cater for such variability. In this paper, we tackle this problem by employing the concept of Persona to aid software engineers understand the various users’ behaviours and improve their ability to design feedback acquisition techniques more efficiently. We create a set of personas based on a mixture of qualitative and quantitative studies and propose PAFA, a Persona-based method for Adaptive Feedback Acquisition

Exploring how to use scenarios to discover requirements

This paper investigates the effectiveness of different uses of scenarios on requirements discovery using results from requirements processes in two projects. The first specified requirements on a new aircraft management system at a regional UK airport to reduce its environmental impact. The second specified new work-based learning tools to be adopted by a consortium of organizations. In both projects scenarios were walked through both in facilitated workshops and in the stakeholders’ workplaces using different forms of a scenario tool. In the second project, scenarios were also walked through with a software prototype and creativity prompts. Results revealed both qualitative and quantitative differences in discovered requirements that have potential implications for models of scenario-based requirements discovery and the design of scenario tools

Systems of systems engineering: A research imperative

Systems of Systems Engineering constitutes a major challenge for the 21st Century and research into this topic has become an imperative. The Support Action, T-AREA-SoS has been initiated by the European Commission to develop a research agenda in Systems of Systems (SoS) that will inform future investment in this area. Through an extensive consultation and review, a number of SoS capability gaps have been identified. Through structuring and subsequent consultation, these have been developed into twelve research themes the detailed areas of which are mapped to the three SoS characteristics of control, evolution, and emergent behaviour. A framework is presented through which researchers can develop a research campaign in SoS. © 2013 IEEE