Requirements engineering with interrelated conceptual models and real world scenes

Abstract

Requirements Engineering (RE) is the process of creating requirements documents with the objective to establish a complete, consistent, and unambiguous description of intended changes (e.g. in respect to software, hardware, or business processes) for a given application domain on an abstract conceptual level. RE is also a cooperative learning process in which stakeholders from different backgrounds (having different experiences and objectives) and requirements analysts have to communicate with each other to gain a common understanding on the application domain as well as to elicit and validate requirements. Because in general, stakeholders are not trained to understand abstract descriptions/ models the use of scenarios (i.e. concrete stories of existing or desired system usage) and real world scenes (captured or animated observations of current or future system usage system usage employing rich media such as video) become more and more popular in industrial practice to improve communication about the application domain and desired changes. However, current scenariobased RE approaches and techniques utilising rich media in the analysis process (e.g., ethnographical or participatory design techniques) do not provide a tight and fine granular integration of scenarios and scenes with conceptual descriptions. The approach presented in this PhD thesis provides tool-supported fine-granular interrelations between parts of abstract concepts of conceptual models and parts of concrete real world scenes that have influenced the creation of the concept or have been used for validation. The established interrelations result in a special form of pre-requirements traceability which extends existing approaches in RE in the way that it provides i) traceability back to concrete instance examples from the real world instead of just tracing between different representations of abstractions and ii) traceability in a fine-grained way allowing interrelations of arbitrary parts of conceptual models with arbitrary parts of real world scenes and not just interrelationships on a document level. We developed methods and a supporting process-integrated modelling environment for three different conceptual modelling languages, which create and utilise the interrelations in a reference base kind of manner to support the explanation and negotiation as well as informal and formal inspections of the conceptual models. The interrelation are also used as a structuring mechanism for the (normally unstructured) real world scenes allowing, for instance, to compare different observations (e.g., two different usage situations of the same activity in different locations) in respect to the concepts they are related to or to evaluate the coverage of the current analysis. We have validated the approach in two case studies and experimental research in the industrial field of mechanical engineering