Developing a requirements management toolset: Lessons learned

Requirements Engineering (RE) is a multi-faceted discipline involving various methods, techniques and tools. RE researchers and practitioners are emphasizing the importance of having an integrated RE process. The need for an integrated toolset to support the effective management of such an integrated RE process cannot be over-emphasized. Tools integration has been identified as an important next step toward the future of requirements management tools. This paper reports on some of the significant architectural and technical issues encountered and the lessons learned in the process of developing an integrated Requirements Management (RM) Toolset: PARsed Natural language Input Processor (PARSNIP) by integrating various independent tools. This paper provides insights on architectural and technological issues typical of these types of projects, the approaches and techniques used to address the architectural mismatches and the technological incompatibilities

An ontological framework to manage the relative conflicts between security and usability requirements

Non Functional Requirements (NFRs) are relative, so are the conflicts among them. In our previously developed catalogue of NFRs conflicts it can be observed that a number of specific pairs of NFRs are claimed to be in conflicts in some cases but they are also claimed not to be in conflict in the other cases. These relative conflicts occur because the positive or negative relationships among NFRs are not always clear and obvious. These relationships might change depending on the meaning of NFRs within the system being developed. This paper focuses on the application of ontology in managing the relative conflicts among NFRs, particularly the relative conflicts between security and usability requirements. The aim is to develop a framework to identify, characterize, and define corresponding resolution strategies for the security-usability conflicts. This paper thus describes the sureCM framework to manage these conflicts; summarizes the security-usability conflicts ontology; and demonstrates how the ontology will be used as a basis to assist analysts in managing conflicts between security and usability requirements. ©2010 IEEE

A Study of the Impact of Requirements Volatility on Software Project Performance

Software development is considered to be a dynamic process where demands for changes seem to be inevitable. Modifications to software are prompted by all kinds of changes including changes to the requirements. This type of changes gives rise to an intrinsic volatility, which has several impacts on the software development lifecycle. This paper describes our findings of an extensive survey based empirical study of requirement volatility (RV) and its impact on software project performance. In particular, findings reveal that requirement volatility has a significant impact on schedule overrun and cost overrun in software projects. Our investigation also examined factors that contribute to the extent of requirement volatility and found that variables such as frequent communications between users and developers and usage of a definable methodology in requirements analysis and modeling have impact on the stability of requirements

Software and the social production of disorder

Software development is inherently an ordering process. When implemented in a workplace it orders the ways that people go about their work, the work they do, and the ways they interact and communicate with each other. This new mode of ordering may conflict with existing orders, existing distributions of power and knowledge, and arrangements of groups, and between groups. Ordering is almost always the subject of dispute, so software development can easily become enmeshed in the politicking between competing groups with deleterious effects. Removing all these conflicts may not be possible, as they can be an essential part of the ways relevant groups interact. Better communication, for example, may actually increase conflict, and not produce harmony. Rather than thinking of order and disorder as mutually exclusive polarities, it is more effective and realistic to think of them as constituting an 'order/disorder complex' and to expect disorder to appear alongside the ordering. This paper explores the problems of ordering and disordering through a study of changes in the Australian Customs' "Integrated Cargo System". We suggest that acceptance of some untidied mess, or openness to both dispute and unclarity, may be useful in implementing functional software. © 2010 IEEE

Mining requirements links

[Context & motivation] Obtaining traceability among requirements and between requirements and other artifacts is an extremely important activity in practice, an interesting area for theoretical study, and a major hurdle in common industrial experience. Substantial effort is spent on establishing and updating such links in any large project - even more so when requirements refer to a product family. [Question/problem] While most research is concerned with ways to reduce the effort needed to establish and maintain traceability links, a different question can also be asked: how is it possible to harness the vast amount of implicit (and tacit) knowledge embedded in already-established links? Is there something to be learned about a specific problem or domain, or about the humans who establish traces, by studying such traces? [Principal ideas/results] In this paper, we present preliminary results from a study applying different machine learning techniques to an industrial case study, and test to what degree common hypothesis hold in our case. [Contribution] Reshaping traceability data into knowledge can contribute to more effective automatic tools to suggest candidates for linking, to inform improvements in writing style, and at the same time provide some insight into both the domain of interest and the actual implementation techniques. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Users' voice and service selection: An empirical study

© 2014 IEEE. Service Oriented software development saves time by reusing existing services and integrates them to create a new system. But selecting a service that satisfies the requirements of all concerned stakeholders is a challenging task. The situation has been exacerbated within the past few years with huge number of services available that offer similar functionalities where the analysts require additional information for making better decision for service selection. User feedback analysis has recently gained a lot of attention for its potential benefits in various areas of requirements engineering. The aim of this research is to evaluate the impact of feedback provided by the end users of the services, on the decision making process for the service selection. In this paper we present an empirical study that utilizes user feedback analysis for selection of a service among 92 available services with similar functionalities. The results show that in scenarios with significant number of services, it is helpful for analysts to consider additional information to select optimally best matched service to the requirements

An insight into the interplay between culture, conflict and distance in globally distributed requirements negotiations

© 2003 IEEE. There is an increasing interest in research addressing issues of global software development. Specifying software requirements is a communication-intensive collaborative activity that is increasingly performed across cultural, language and time zone boundaries. While inadequate communication significantly impacts the bridging of geographical distance between stakeholders, the cultural differences cannot be considered less significant. Findings from two global software development organizations enables us to present a model of impact of distance and the affected requirements activities due to problems of cultural diversity, inadequate communication, knowledge management and time differences. This evidence provides an important insight into the interplay between culture and conflict as well as the impact of distance on the ability to reconcile different viewpoints with regards to requirements and requirements processes

Requirements elicitation: A survey of techniques, approaches, and tools

Requirements elicitation is the process of seeking, uncovering, acquiring, and elaborating requirements for computer based systems. It is generally understood that requirements are elicited rather than just captured or collected. This implies there are discovery, emergence, and development elements in the elicitation process. Requirements elicitation is a complex process involving many activities with a variety of available techniques, approaches, and tools for performing them. The relative strengths and weaknesses of these determine when each is appropriate depending on the context and situation. The objectives of this chapter are to present a comprehensive survey of important aspects of the techniques, approaches, and tools for requirements elicitation, and examine the current issues, trends, and challenges faced by researchers and practitioners in this field. © 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

On the interplay between consistency, completeness, and correctness in requirements evolution

The initial expression of requirements for a computer-based system is often informal and possibly vague. Requirements engineers need to examine this often incomplete and inconsistent brief expression of needs. Based on the available knowledge and expertise, assumptions are made and conclusions are deduced to transform this 'rough sketch' into more complete, consistent, and hence correct requirements. This paper addresses the question of how to characterize these properties in an evolutionary framework, and what relationships link these properties to a customer's view of correctness. Moreover, we describe in rigorous terms the different kinds of validation checks that must be performed on different parts of a requirements specification in order to ensure that errors (i.e. cases of inconsistency and incompleteness) are detected and marked as such, leading to better quality requirements. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

ELICA: An Automated Tool for Dynamic Extraction of Requirements Relevant Information

Requirements elicitation requires extensive knowledge and deep understanding of the problem domain where the final system will be situated. However, in many software development projects, analysts are required to elicit the requirements from an unfamiliar domain, which often causes communication barriers between analysts and stakeholders. In this paper, we propose a requirements ELICitation Aid tool (ELICA) to help analysts better understand the target application domain by dynamic extraction and labeling of requirements-relevant knowledge. To extract the relevant terms, we leverage the flexibility and power of Weighted Finite State Transducers (WFSTs) in dynamic modeling of natural language processing tasks. In addition to the information conveyed through text, ELICA captures and processes non-linguistic information about the intention of speakers such as their confidence level, analytical tone, and emotions. The extracted information is made available to the analysts as a set of labeled snippets with highlighted relevant terms which can also be exported as an artifact of the Requirements Engineering (RE) process. The application and usefulness of ELICA are demonstrated through a case study. This study shows how pre-existing relevant information about the application domain and the information captured during an elicitation meeting, such as the conversation and stakeholders' intentions, can be captured and used to support analysts achieving their tasks.Comment: 2018 IEEE 26th International Requirements Engineering Conference Workshop