| 1. |
- Ambreen, T., et al.
(författare)
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Empirical research in requirements engineering : trends and opportunities
- 2018
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Ingår i: Requirements Engineering. - : Springer London. - 0947-3602 .- 1432-010X. ; 23:1, s. 63-95
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Requirements engineering (RE) being a foundation of software development has gained a great recognition in the recent era of prevailing software industry. A number of journals and conferences have published a great amount of RE research in terms of various tools, techniques, methods, and frameworks, with a variety of processes applicable in different software development domains. The plethora of empirical RE research needs to be synthesized to identify trends and future research directions. To represent a state-of-the-art of requirements engineering, along with various trends and opportunities of empirical RE research, we conducted a systematic mapping study to synthesize the empirical work done in RE. We used four major databases IEEE, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink and ACM and Identified 270 primary studies till the year 2012. An analysis of the data extracted from primary studies shows that the empirical research work in RE is on the increase since the year 2000. The requirements elicitation with 22 % of the total studies, requirements analysis with 19 % and RE process with 17 % are the major focus areas of empirical RE research. Non-functional requirements were found to be the most researched emerging area. The empirical work in the sub-area of requirements validation and verification is little and has a decreasing trend. The majority of the studies (50 %) used a case study research method followed by experiments (28 %), whereas the experience reports are few (6 %). A common trend in almost all RE sub-areas is about proposing new interventions. The leading intervention types are guidelines, techniques and processes. The interest in RE empirical research is on the rise as whole. However, requirements validation and verification area, despite its recognized importance, lacks empirical research at present. Furthermore, requirements evolution and privacy requirements also have little empirical research. These RE sub-areas need the attention of researchers for more empirical research. At present, the focus of empirical RE research is more about proposing new interventions. In future, there is a need to replicate existing studies as well to evaluate the RE interventions in more real contexts and scenarios. The practitioners’ involvement in RE empirical research needs to be increased so that they share their experiences of using different RE interventions and also inform us about the current requirements-related challenges and issues that they face in their work. © 2016 Springer-Verlag London
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| 2. |
- Berntsson Svensson, Richard, 1978, et al.
(författare)
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Is role playing in Requirements Engineering Education increasing learning outcome?
- 2017
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Ingår i: Requirements Engineering. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0947-3602 .- 1432-010X. ; 22:4, s. 475-489
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Requirements Engineering has attracted a great deal of attention from researchers and practitioners in recent years. This increasing interest requires academia to provide students with a solid foundation in the subject matter. In Requirements Engineering Education (REE), it is important to cover three fundamental topics: traditional analysis and modeling skills, interviewing skills for requirements elicitation, and writing skills for specifying requirements. REE papers report about using role playing as a pedagogical tool; however, there is a surprising lack of empirical evidence on its utility. In this paper we investigate whether a higher grade in a role playing project have an effect on students' score in an individual written exam in a Requirements Engineering course. Data are collected from 412 students between the years of 2007 and 2014 at Lund University and Chalmers | University of Gothenburg. The results show that students who received a higher grade in the role playing project scored statistically significant higher in the written exam compared to the students with a lower role playing project grade.
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| 3. |
- Bjarnason, Elizabeth, et al.
(författare)
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The role of distances in requirements communication: a case study
- 2017
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Ingår i: Requirements Engineering. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0947-3602 .- 1432-010X. ; 22, s. 1-26
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Requirements communication plays a vital role in development projects in coordinating the customers, the business roles and the software engineers. Communication gaps represent a significant source of project failures and overruns. For example, misunderstood or uncommunicated requirements can lead to software that does not meet the customers’ requirements, and subsequent low number of sales or additional cost required to redo the implementation. We propose that requirements engineering (RE) distance measures are useful for locating gaps in requirements communication and for improving on development practice. In this paper, we present a case study of one software development project to evaluate this proposition. Thirteen RE distances were measured including geographical and cognitive distances between project members, and semantic distances between requirements and testing artefacts. The findings confirm that RE distances impact requirements communication and project coordination. Furthermore, the concept of distances was found to enable constructive group reflection on communication gaps and improvements to development practices. The insights reported in this paper can provide practitioners with an increased awareness of distances and their impact. Furthermore, the results provide a stepping stone for further research into RE distances and methods for improving on software development processes and practices.
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| 4. |
- Fricker, Samuel A., et al.
(författare)
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Workshop Videos for Requirements Communication
- 2016
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Ingår i: Requirements Engineering. - : Springer. - 0947-3602 .- 1432-010X. ; 21:4, s. 521-552
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Shared understanding of requirements between stakeholders and the development team is a critical success factor for requirements engineering. Workshops are an effective means for achieving such shared understanding since stakeholders and team representatives can meet and discuss what a planned software system should be and how it should support achieving stakeholder goals. However, some important intended recipients of the requirements are often not present in such workshops: the developers. Thus, they cannot benefit from the in-depth understanding of the requirements and of the rationales for these requirements that develops during the workshops. The simple handover of a requirements specification hardly compensates the rich requirements understanding that is needed for the development of an acceptable system. To compensate the lack of presence in a requirements workshop, we propose to record that requirements workshop on video. If workshop participants agree to be recorded, a video is relatively simple to create and is able to capture much more aspects about requirements and rationales than a specification document. This paper presents the workshop video technique and a phenomenological evaluation of its use for requirements communication from the perspective of software developers. The results show how the technique was appreciated by observers of the video, present positive and negative feedbacks from the observers, and lead to recommendations for implementing the technique in practice.
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| 5. |
- Horkoff, Jennifer, 1980, et al.
(författare)
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Goal-oriented requirements engineering: an extended systematic mapping study
- 2019
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Ingår i: Requirements Engineering. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0947-3602 .- 1432-010X. ; 24:2, s. 133-160
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Over the last two decades, much attention has been paid to the area of goal-oriented requirements engineering (GORE), where goals are used as a useful conceptualization to elicit, model, and analyze requirements, capturing alternatives and conflicts. Goal modeling has been adapted and applied to many sub-topics within requirements engineering (RE) and beyond, such as agent orientation, aspect orientation, business intelligence, model-driven development, and security. Despite extensive efforts in this field, the RE community lacks a recent, general systematic literature review of the area. In this work, we present a systematic mapping study, covering the 246 top-cited GORE-related conference and journal papers, according to Scopus. Our literature map addresses several research questions: we classify the types of papers (e.g., proposals, formalizations, meta-studies), look at the presence of evaluation, the topics covered (e.g., security, agents, scenarios), frameworks used, venues, citations, author networks, and overall publication numbers. For most questions, we evaluate trends over time. Our findings show a proliferation of papers with new ideas and few citations, with a small number of authors and papers dominating citations; however, there is a slight rise in papers which build upon past work (implementations, integrations, and extensions). We see a rise in papers concerning adaptation/variability/evolution and a slight rise in case studies. Overall, interest in GORE has increased. We use our analysis results to make recommendations concerning future GORE research and make our data publicly available.
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| 6. |
- Knauss, Eric, 1977, et al.
(författare)
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Continuous Clarification and Emergent Requirements Flows in Open-Commercial Software Ecosystems
- 2018
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Ingår i: Requirements Engineering. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0947-3602 .- 1432-010X. ; 23:1, s. 97-117
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Software engineering practice has shifted from the development of products in closed environments towards more open and collaborative efforts. Software development has become significantly interdependent with other systems (e.g. services, apps) and typically takes place within large ecosystems of networked communities of stakeholder organizations. Such software ecosystems promise increased innovation power and support for consumer oriented software services at scale and are characterized by a certain openness of their information flows. While such openness supports project and reputation management, it also brings requirements engineering-related challenges within the ecosystem, such as managing dynamic, emergent contributions from the ecosystem stakeholders, as well as collecting their input while protecting their IP. In this paper we report from a study of requirements communication and management practices within IBM(R)'s Collaborative Lifecycle Management(R) product development ecosystem. Our research used multiple methods for data collection, including interviews within several ecosystem actors, on-site participatory observation, and analysis of online project repositories. We chart and describe the flow of product requirements information through the ecosystem, how the open communication paradigm in software ecosystems provides opportunities for 'just-in-time' RE - and which relies on emergent contributions from the ecosystem stakeholders-, as well as some of the challenges faced when traditional requirements engineering approaches are applied within such an ecosystem. More importantly, we discuss two tradeoffs brought about by the openness in software ecosystems: i) allowing open, transparent communication while keeping intellectual property confidential within the ecosystem, and ii) having the ability to act globally on a long-term strategy while empowering product teams to act locally to answer end-users' context specific needs in a timely manner. A sufficient level of openness facilitates contributions of emergent stakeholders. The ability to include important emergent contributors early in requirements elicitation appears to be a crucial asset in software ecosystems.
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| 7. |
- Liebel, Grischa, 1987, et al.
(författare)
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Organisation and Communication Problems in Automotive Requirements Engineering
- 2018
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Ingår i: Requirements Engineering. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0947-3602 .- 1432-010X. ; 23:1, s. 145-167
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Project success in the automotive industry is highly influenced by Requirements Engineering (RE), for which communication and organisation structure play a major role, much due to the scale and distribution of these projects. However, empirical research is scarce on these aspects of automotive RE and warrants closer examination. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to identify problems or challenges in automotive RE with respect to communication and organisation structure. Using a multiple-case study approach, we collected data via 14 semi-structured interviews at one car manufacturer and one supplier. We tested our findings from the case study with a questionnaire distributed to practitioners in the automotive industry. Our results indicate that it is difficult but increasingly important to establish communication channels outside the fixed organisation structure and that responsibilities are often unclear. Product knowledge during early requirements elicitation and context knowledge later on is lacking. Furthermore, abstraction gaps between requirements on different abstraction levels leads to inconsistencies. For academia, we formulate a concrete agenda for future research. Practitioners can use the findings to broaden their understanding of how the problems manifest and to improve their organisations.
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| 8. |
- Oliinyk, Olesia, et al.
(författare)
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Structuring automotive product lines and feature models : an exploratory study at Opel
- 2017
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Ingår i: Requirements Engineering. - : Springer. - 0947-3602 .- 1432-010X. ; 22, s. 105-135
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Automotive systems are highly complex and customized systems containing a vast amount of variability. Feature modeling plays a key role in customization. Empirical evidence through industry application, and in particular methodological guidance of how to structure automotive product lines and their feature models is needed. The overall aim of this work is to provide guidance to practitioners how to structure automotive product lines and their feature models, understanding strengths and weaknesses of alternative structures. The research was conducted in three phases. In the first phase, the context situation was understood using interviews and workshops. In the second phase, possible structures of product lines and feature models were evaluated based on industry feedback collected in workshops. In the third phase, the structures were implemented in the tool GEARS and practitioner feedback was collected. One key challenge was the unavailability of structuring guidelines, which was the focus of this research. The structures considered most suitable for the automotive product line were multiple product lines with modular decomposition. The structures most suitable for the feature model were functional decomposition, using context variability, models corresponding to assets, and feature categories. Other structures have been discarded, and the rationales have been presented. It was possible to support the most suitable structures with the commercial tool GEARS. The implementation in GEARS and the feedback from the practitioners provide early indications for the potential usefulness of the structures and the tool implementation.
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| 9. |
- Svahnberg, Mikael, et al.
(författare)
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Uni-REPM : a framework for requirements engineering process assessment
- 2015
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Ingår i: Requirements Engineering. - : Springer. - 0947-3602 .- 1432-010X. ; 20:1, s. 91-118
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- It has been shown that potential business benefits could be achieved by assessing and improving the requirements engineering (RE) process. However, process assessment models such as CMMI and ISO9000 only cover RE shallowly. Tailored models such as REGPG and REPM, on the other hand, do not cover market-driven requirements engineering. Other attempts such as MDREPM covers market-driven requirements engineering, but correspondingly neglects bespoke requirements engineering. Moreover, the area itself has evolved so practices that once were cutting edge are now commonplace. In this article, we develop and evaluate a unified requirements engineering process maturity model (Uni-REPM) that can be used in a market-driven as well as a bespoke context. This model is based on REPM, but has evolved to reflect contemporary requirements engineering practices. Uni-REPM is primarily created based on a systematic literature review of market-driven requirements engineering practices and a literature review of bespoke practices. Based on the results, Uni-REPM is formulated. The objective of Uni-REPM is twofold. Firstly, it is expected to be applicable for assessing the maturity of RE processes in various scenarios where an organisation would use different development approaches. Secondly, it instructs practitioners about which RE practices to perform and their expected benefits. As an assessment instrument, Uni-REPM provides a simple and low-cost solution for practitioners to identify the status of their RE process. As a guidance tool, Uni-REPM lessens the gap between theoretical and practical worlds by transferring the available RE technologies from research to industry practice.
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| 10. |
- Westman, Jonas, 1986-, et al.
(författare)
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Providing Tool Support for Specifying Safety-Critical Systems by Enforcing Syntactic Contract Conditions
- 2019
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Ingår i: Requirements Engineering. - London : Springer. - 0947-3602 .- 1432-010X. ; 24:2, s. 231-256
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Functional safety standards such as IEC 61508 and ISO 26262 advocate a particularly stringent requirements engineering where safety requirements must be structured in a hierarchical manner and specified in accordance with the system architecture. In contrast to the stringent requirements engineering in functional safety standards, according to previous studies, requirements engineering in industry is in general of poor quality. Contracts theory has been previously shown to be suitable for supporting such a stringent requirements engineering effort; this support has also been implemented in tools. However, to use these contract-based tools, requirements must be formalized, which is a major challenge in industry. Therefore, to support current industrial requirements engineering practice and the stringent requirements engineering in functional safety standards, it is shown how tool support can be provided even when requirements, and also architectures, are not formalized. This is achieved by enforcing syntactic, yet formal, conditions in contracts theory. Despite the need for further validation, initial findings in an industrial case study indicate high potential in realizing the proposed support in an industrial setting.
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