This position paper reflects on recent work that sought to make positive changes to the IEEE Requirements Engineering conference (RE), and on twenty years of requirements engineering (REng) research. We question the values that seem to underpin RE, and offer what we believe are more appropriate values. We argue that these new values would result in better alignment between research and the needs of industry. Further, the new values would encourage more rewarding work for researchers, and would lead to a better RE conference. We summarise the value shift in a draft manifesto for applied research in REng. To illustrate the potential for concrete changes, we suggest one possible wiki-based model for REng research that could deliver these new values.
{"title":"A new paradigm for applied requirements engineering research","authors":"Martin Mahaux, Alistair Mavin","doi":"10.1109/RE.2013.6636750","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2013.6636750","url":null,"abstract":"This position paper reflects on recent work that sought to make positive changes to the IEEE Requirements Engineering conference (RE), and on twenty years of requirements engineering (REng) research. We question the values that seem to underpin RE, and offer what we believe are more appropriate values. We argue that these new values would result in better alignment between research and the needs of industry. Further, the new values would encourage more rewarding work for researchers, and would lead to a better RE conference. We summarise the value shift in a draft manifesto for applied research in REng. To illustrate the potential for concrete changes, we suggest one possible wiki-based model for REng research that could deliver these new values.","PeriodicalId":6342,"journal":{"name":"2013 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"69 1","pages":"353-356"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90451804","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Early modeling languages have focused on the analysis and the design of systems under construction, but not on requirements elicitation. Consequently, a wide variety of approaches exists for the early phases of requirements engineering, modeling various concepts as stakeholders, goals, features, product lines, systems, processes, risks, and requirements. The purpose of Unified Requirements Modeling Language (URML TM) is to combine these concepts in a single modeling language. In addition, it strengthens support for danger modeling. URML is implemented as an add-in to the Enterprise Architect CASE tool. This tool demo will showcase the URML implementation.
{"title":"A tool implementation of the unified requirements modeling language as enterprise architect add-in","authors":"Florian Schneider, B. Brügge, B. Berenbach","doi":"10.1109/RE.2013.6636742","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2013.6636742","url":null,"abstract":"Early modeling languages have focused on the analysis and the design of systems under construction, but not on requirements elicitation. Consequently, a wide variety of approaches exists for the early phases of requirements engineering, modeling various concepts as stakeholders, goals, features, product lines, systems, processes, risks, and requirements. The purpose of Unified Requirements Modeling Language (URML TM) is to combine these concepts in a single modeling language. In addition, it strengthens support for danger modeling. URML is implemented as an add-in to the Enterprise Architect CASE tool. This tool demo will showcase the URML implementation.","PeriodicalId":6342,"journal":{"name":"2013 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"126 1","pages":"334-335"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73006610","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Junjie Wang, Juan Li, Qing Wang, D. Yang, He Zhang, Mingshu Li
Complexity cohesion and coupling have been recognized as prominent indicators for software quality. One characterization of software complexity is the existence of dependency relationship. Moreover, degree of dependency reflects the cohesion and coupling between software elements. Dependencies on design and implementation phase have been proven as important predictors for software bugs. We empirically investigated how requirements dependencies correlate with and predict software integration bugs, which can provide early estimate regarding software quality, therefore facilitate decision making early in the software lifecycle. We conducted network analysis on requirements dependency networks of two commercial software projects. We then performed correlation analysis between network measures (e.g., degree, closeness) and number of bugs. Afterwards, bug prediction models were built using these network measures. Significant correlation is observed between most of our network measures and number of bugs. These network measures can predict the number of bugs with high accuracy and sensitivity. We further identified the significant predictors for bug prediction. Besides, the indication effect of network measures on bug number varies among different types of requirements dependency. These observations show that requirements dependency network can be used as an early indicator of software Integration bugs.
{"title":"Can requirements dependency network be used as early indicator of software integration bugs?","authors":"Junjie Wang, Juan Li, Qing Wang, D. Yang, He Zhang, Mingshu Li","doi":"10.1109/RE.2013.6636718","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2013.6636718","url":null,"abstract":"Complexity cohesion and coupling have been recognized as prominent indicators for software quality. One characterization of software complexity is the existence of dependency relationship. Moreover, degree of dependency reflects the cohesion and coupling between software elements. Dependencies on design and implementation phase have been proven as important predictors for software bugs. We empirically investigated how requirements dependencies correlate with and predict software integration bugs, which can provide early estimate regarding software quality, therefore facilitate decision making early in the software lifecycle. We conducted network analysis on requirements dependency networks of two commercial software projects. We then performed correlation analysis between network measures (e.g., degree, closeness) and number of bugs. Afterwards, bug prediction models were built using these network measures. Significant correlation is observed between most of our network measures and number of bugs. These network measures can predict the number of bugs with high accuracy and sensitivity. We further identified the significant predictors for bug prediction. Besides, the indication effect of network measures on bug number varies among different types of requirements dependency. These observations show that requirements dependency network can be used as an early indicator of software Integration bugs.","PeriodicalId":6342,"journal":{"name":"2013 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"381 1","pages":"185-194"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84963379","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The past decade has seen a substantial increase in the issuance of privacy and security regulations governing personal information. Ensuring system and organizational compliance is both more important and more difficult than ever before, as the penalties have become more severe, and regulations more complex and nuanced. This also presents substantial difficulties for multi-national companies, as different states, countries, or regions do not adhere to a uniform standard, resulting in a mixed set of regulations for the systems they govern. In this work, I describe a framework to address this issue, referred to as requirements water marking, wherein requirements from different jurisdictions that govern the same system may be evaluated and reduced to a single standard of care, establishing a “high water mark” for regulatory compliance and reducing requirements complexity. The framework, which draws on work in requirements specification languages and requirements comparison, allows engineers and legal experts to systematically simplify compliance and determine both high and low standards of care, while maintaining traceability back to the original legal text. In addition, I investigate the proposed value of legal requirements models, demonstrating the relationship between proposed value of these models to organizational decision-making and the validity of the model.
{"title":"The regulatory world and the machine: Harmonizing legal requirements and the systems they affect","authors":"David G. Gordon","doi":"10.1109/RE.2013.6636760","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2013.6636760","url":null,"abstract":"The past decade has seen a substantial increase in the issuance of privacy and security regulations governing personal information. Ensuring system and organizational compliance is both more important and more difficult than ever before, as the penalties have become more severe, and regulations more complex and nuanced. This also presents substantial difficulties for multi-national companies, as different states, countries, or regions do not adhere to a uniform standard, resulting in a mixed set of regulations for the systems they govern. In this work, I describe a framework to address this issue, referred to as requirements water marking, wherein requirements from different jurisdictions that govern the same system may be evaluated and reduced to a single standard of care, establishing a “high water mark” for regulatory compliance and reducing requirements complexity. The framework, which draws on work in requirements specification languages and requirements comparison, allows engineers and legal experts to systematically simplify compliance and determine both high and low standards of care, while maintaining traceability back to the original legal text. In addition, I investigate the proposed value of legal requirements models, demonstrating the relationship between proposed value of these models to organizational decision-making and the validity of the model.","PeriodicalId":6342,"journal":{"name":"2013 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"83 1","pages":"381-384"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83793985","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
N. Larburu, I. Widya, R. Bults, H. Hermens, C. Napolitano
Ubiquity of Information and Communication Technology enables innovative telemedicine treatment applications for disease management of ambulant patients. Development of new treatment applications must comply with medical protocols and `way of working' to obtain safety and efficacy evidence before acceptance and use by medical practitioners. Usually, medical researchers design new treatment applications and engineers elicit application requirements in collaboration with these researchers to bridge the knowledge and `way of working' gaps between them. This paper presents an elicitation method for new telemedicine applications in a collaborative setting of time-constraint medical practitioners and requirements engineers if the medical researcher is absent. Engineers compensate this lack of resources through cross-disciplinary studies and use of pathophysiological models in the absence of medical evidence. The paper discusses the application of a mixed elicitation method presented in earlier work in the addressed setting. The method applies a scenario based user needs analysis augmented by domain activity and user-system interaction analysis. The elicitation is conducted in a separation of concerns fashion combined with collaboration handshake protocols to align domain activities and user-system interactions. Later phase elicitation of user-system interaction requirements may apply known methods and is not addressed.
{"title":"Early phase telemedicine requirements elicitation in collaboration with medical practitioners","authors":"N. Larburu, I. Widya, R. Bults, H. Hermens, C. Napolitano","doi":"10.1109/RE.2013.6636729","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2013.6636729","url":null,"abstract":"Ubiquity of Information and Communication Technology enables innovative telemedicine treatment applications for disease management of ambulant patients. Development of new treatment applications must comply with medical protocols and `way of working' to obtain safety and efficacy evidence before acceptance and use by medical practitioners. Usually, medical researchers design new treatment applications and engineers elicit application requirements in collaboration with these researchers to bridge the knowledge and `way of working' gaps between them. This paper presents an elicitation method for new telemedicine applications in a collaborative setting of time-constraint medical practitioners and requirements engineers if the medical researcher is absent. Engineers compensate this lack of resources through cross-disciplinary studies and use of pathophysiological models in the absence of medical evidence. The paper discusses the application of a mixed elicitation method presented in earlier work in the addressed setting. The method applies a scenario based user needs analysis augmented by domain activity and user-system interaction analysis. The elicitation is conducted in a separation of concerns fashion combined with collaboration handshake protocols to align domain activities and user-system interactions. Later phase elicitation of user-system interaction requirements may apply known methods and is not addressed.","PeriodicalId":6342,"journal":{"name":"2013 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"51 1","pages":"273-278"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90049459","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Requirements elicitation is widely seen as a crucial step towards delivering successful software. In the context of emerging cloud systems, the question is whether and how the elicitation process differs from that used for traditional systems, and if the current methods suffice. We interviewed 19 cloud providers to gain an in-depth understanding of the state of practice with regard to the adoption and implementation of existing elicitation methods. The results of this exploratory study show that, whereas a few cloud providers try to implement and adapt traditional methods, the large majority uses ad-hoc approaches for identifying consumer needs. There are various causes for this situation, ranging from consumer reachability issues and previous failed attempts, to a complete lack of development strategy. The study suggests that only a small number of the current techniques can be applied successfully in cloud systems, hence showing a need to research new ways of supporting cloud providers. The main contribution of this work lies in revealing what elicitation methods are used by cloud providers and clarifying the challenges related to requirements elicitation posed by the cloud paradigm. Further, we identify some key features for cloud-specific elicitation methods.
{"title":"How cloud providers elicit consumer requirements: An exploratory study of nineteen companies","authors":"Irina Todoran Koitz, N. Seyff, M. Glinz","doi":"10.1109/RE.2013.6636710","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2013.6636710","url":null,"abstract":"Requirements elicitation is widely seen as a crucial step towards delivering successful software. In the context of emerging cloud systems, the question is whether and how the elicitation process differs from that used for traditional systems, and if the current methods suffice. We interviewed 19 cloud providers to gain an in-depth understanding of the state of practice with regard to the adoption and implementation of existing elicitation methods. The results of this exploratory study show that, whereas a few cloud providers try to implement and adapt traditional methods, the large majority uses ad-hoc approaches for identifying consumer needs. There are various causes for this situation, ranging from consumer reachability issues and previous failed attempts, to a complete lack of development strategy. The study suggests that only a small number of the current techniques can be applied successfully in cloud systems, hence showing a need to research new ways of supporting cloud providers. The main contribution of this work lies in revealing what elicitation methods are used by cloud providers and clarifying the challenges related to requirements elicitation posed by the cloud paradigm. Further, we identify some key features for cloud-specific elicitation methods.","PeriodicalId":6342,"journal":{"name":"2013 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"84 1","pages":"105-114"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89609327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Aaron K. Massey, Jacob Eisenstein, A. Antón, Peter P. Swire
Businesses and organizations in jurisdictions around the world are required by law to provide their customers and users with information about their business practices in the form of policy documents. Requirements engineers analyze these documents as sources of requirements, but this analysis is a time-consuming and mostly manual process. Moreover, policy documents contain legalese and present readability challenges to requirements engineers seeking to analyze them. In this paper, we perform a large-scale analysis of 2,061 policy documents, including policy documents from the Google Top 1000 most visited websites and the Fortune 500 companies, for three purposes: (1) to assess the readability of these policy documents for requirements engineers; (2) to determine if automated text mining can indicate whether a policy document contains requirements expressed as either privacy protections or vulnerabilities; and (3) to establish the generalizability of prior work in the identification of privacy protections and vulnerabilities from privacy policies to other policy documents. Our results suggest that this requirements analysis technique, developed on a small set of policy documents in two domains, may generalize to other domains.
{"title":"Automated text mining for requirements analysis of policy documents","authors":"Aaron K. Massey, Jacob Eisenstein, A. Antón, Peter P. Swire","doi":"10.1109/RE.2013.6636700","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2013.6636700","url":null,"abstract":"Businesses and organizations in jurisdictions around the world are required by law to provide their customers and users with information about their business practices in the form of policy documents. Requirements engineers analyze these documents as sources of requirements, but this analysis is a time-consuming and mostly manual process. Moreover, policy documents contain legalese and present readability challenges to requirements engineers seeking to analyze them. In this paper, we perform a large-scale analysis of 2,061 policy documents, including policy documents from the Google Top 1000 most visited websites and the Fortune 500 companies, for three purposes: (1) to assess the readability of these policy documents for requirements engineers; (2) to determine if automated text mining can indicate whether a policy document contains requirements expressed as either privacy protections or vulnerabilities; and (3) to establish the generalizability of prior work in the identification of privacy protections and vulnerabilities from privacy policies to other policy documents. Our results suggest that this requirements analysis technique, developed on a small set of policy documents in two domains, may generalize to other domains.","PeriodicalId":6342,"journal":{"name":"2013 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"29 1","pages":"4-13"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85630748","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper describes IRENE (Indenica Requirements ElicitatioN mEthod), a methodology to elicit and model the requirements of service platforms, and IRET (IREne Tool), the Eclipse-based modeling framework we developed for IRENE.
{"title":"IRET: Requirements for service platforms","authors":"L. Baresi, G. Ripa, L. Pasquale","doi":"10.1109/RE.2013.6636743","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2013.6636743","url":null,"abstract":"This paper describes IRENE (Indenica Requirements ElicitatioN mEthod), a methodology to elicit and model the requirements of service platforms, and IRET (IREne Tool), the Eclipse-based modeling framework we developed for IRENE.","PeriodicalId":6342,"journal":{"name":"2013 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"7 1","pages":"336-337"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88864889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We present a method for the automatic extraction of glossary terms from unconstrained natural language requirements. The glossary terms are identified in two steps - a) compute units (which are candidates for glossary terms) b) disambiguate between the mutually exclusive units to identify terms. We introduce novel linguistic techniques to identify process nouns, abstract nouns and auxiliary verbs. The identification of units also handles co-ordinating conjunctions and adjectival modifiers. This requires solving co-ordination ambiguity and adjectival modifier ambiguity. The identification of terms among the units adapts an in-document statistical metric. We present an evaluation of our method over a real-life set of software requirements' documents and compare our results with that of a base algorithm. The intricate linguistic classification and the tackling of ambiguity result in superior performance of our approach over the base algorithm.
{"title":"Automatic extraction of glossary terms from natural language requirements","authors":"Anurag Dwarakanath, Roshni Ramnani, Shubhashis Sengupta","doi":"10.1109/RE.2013.6636736","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2013.6636736","url":null,"abstract":"We present a method for the automatic extraction of glossary terms from unconstrained natural language requirements. The glossary terms are identified in two steps - a) compute units (which are candidates for glossary terms) b) disambiguate between the mutually exclusive units to identify terms. We introduce novel linguistic techniques to identify process nouns, abstract nouns and auxiliary verbs. The identification of units also handles co-ordinating conjunctions and adjectival modifiers. This requires solving co-ordination ambiguity and adjectival modifier ambiguity. The identification of terms among the units adapts an in-document statistical metric. We present an evaluation of our method over a real-life set of software requirements' documents and compare our results with that of a base algorithm. The intricate linguistic classification and the tackling of ambiguity result in superior performance of our approach over the base algorithm.","PeriodicalId":6342,"journal":{"name":"2013 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"30 1","pages":"314-319"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88047450","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Many prominent open source software (OSS) development projects produce systems without overt requirements artifacts or processes, contrary to expectations resulting from classical software development experience and research, and a growing number of critical software systems are evolved and sustained in this way yet provide quality and rich functional capabilities to users and integrators that accept them without question. We examine data from several OSS projects to investigate this conundrum, and discuss the results of research into OSS outcomes that sheds light on the consequences of this approach to software requirements in terms of risk of development failure and quality of the resulting system.
{"title":"Ongoing software development without classical requirements","authors":"T. Alspaugh, W. Scacchi","doi":"10.1109/RE.2013.6636716","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2013.6636716","url":null,"abstract":"Many prominent open source software (OSS) development projects produce systems without overt requirements artifacts or processes, contrary to expectations resulting from classical software development experience and research, and a growing number of critical software systems are evolved and sustained in this way yet provide quality and rich functional capabilities to users and integrators that accept them without question. We examine data from several OSS projects to investigate this conundrum, and discuss the results of research into OSS outcomes that sheds light on the consequences of this approach to software requirements in terms of risk of development failure and quality of the resulting system.","PeriodicalId":6342,"journal":{"name":"2013 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"6 1","pages":"165-174"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82762921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}