Requirements Engineering最新文献

As software engineering (SE) practitioners, we can help society by using our communities of experts to address a software need of a socially conscious organization. Doing so can benefit society in the locale of a SE conference and provide access to international experts for local organizations. Furthermore, established SE researchers as well as practitioners and students have the opportunity for a unique learning experience. While the SE community has already realized the importance of addressing human values and promoting social good objectives in software development, we are unaware of previous attempts to leverage SE conferences for this activity. Conferences present an opportunity to enjoy the assembly of SE practitioners, researchers, and students for the purpose of a philanthropic endeavor. Over the past four years of running a "Requirements Engineering for Social Good" event called RE Cares, co-located with the International Conference on Requirements Engineering, we worked with the stakeholders local to the conference venue. We selected stakeholders who would not necessarily have ready access to requirements engineering, software design, and development expertise otherwise, to build software targeting "good causes." In the last two years, this event was altered to adapt to the constraints induced by COVID-19, moving to a hybrid mode and changing many of its practices accordingly. This paper summarizes and generalizes our experiences, discussing our lessons learned in the context of the pandemic and beyond and providing a framework for conducting similar social contribution in any SE conferences in general.

Poorly executed requirements engineering activities profoundly affect the deliverables' quality and project's budget and schedule. High-quality requirements reuse through requirement patterns has been widely discussed to mitigate these adverse outcomes. Requirement patterns aggregate similar applications' behaviors and services into well-defined templates that can be reused in later specifications. The abstraction capabilities of metamodeling have shown promising results concerning the improvement of the requirement specifications' quality and professionals' productivity. However, there is a lack of research on requirement patterns beyond requirements engineering, even using metamodels as the underlying structure. Besides, most companies often struggle with the cost, rework, and delay effects resulting from a weak alignment between requirements and testing. In this paper, we present a novel metamodeling approach, called  Software Pattern MetaModel (SoPaMM), which aligns requirements and testing through requirement patterns and test patterns. Influenced by well-established agile practices, SoPaMM describes functional requirement patterns and acceptance test patterns as user stories integrated with executable behaviors. Another novelty is the evaluation of SoPaMM's quality properties against a metamodel quality evaluation framework. We detail the evaluation planning, discuss evaluation results, and present our study's threats to validity. Our experience with the design and evaluation of SoPaMM is summarized as lessons learned.

According to data-driven Requirements Engineering (RE), explicit and implicit user feedback can be considered a relevant source of requirements, thus supporting requirements elicitation. However, limited attention has been paid so far to the role of online feedback in RE tasks, such as requirements validation, and on how to specify what online feedback to collect and analyse. We performed an action research study, together with a company that developed a platform for online training. This paper presents the design and execution of the study, and a discussion of its results. This study provides evidence about the need of practitioners to follow a simple but systematic approach for specifying requirements for data collection and analysis, at design time. Another outcome of this study is a method to tackle this task that leverages goal-oriented requirements modelling combined with Goal-Question-Metric. The applicability of the method has been explored on two industrial evaluations, while the perceived effectiveness, efficiency and acceptance have been assessed with practitioners through a dedicated survey.

Requirements engineering (RE) has established itself as a core software engineering discipline. It is well acknowledged that good RE leads to higher quality software and considerably reduces the risk of failure or budget-overspending of software development projects. It is of vital importance to train future software engineers in RE and educate future requirements engineers to adequately manage requirements in various projects. To this date, there exists no central concept of what RE education shall comprise. To lay a foundation, we report on a systematic literature review of the field and provide a systematic map describing the current state of RE education. Doing so allows us to describe how the educational landscape has changed over the last decade. Results show that only a few established author collaborations exist and that RE education research is predominantly published in venues other than the top RE research venues (i.e., in venues other than the RE conference and journal). Key trends in RE instruction of the past decade include involvement of real or realistic stakeholders, teaching predominantly elicitation as an RE activity, and increasing student factors such as motivation or communication skills. Finally, we discuss open opportunities in RE education, such as training for security requirements and supply chain risk management, as well as developing a pedagogical foundation grounded in evidence of effective instructional approaches.