| 1. |
- Bjarnason, Elizabeth, et al.
(author)
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2nd International Workshop on Requirements Engineering and Testing (RET 2015)
- 2015
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In: 2015 IEEE/ACM 37TH IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING, VOL 2. - : IEEE. - 9781479919345 ; , s. 997-998
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The RET (Requirements Engineering and Testing) workshop provides a meeting point for researchers and practitioners from the two separate fields of Requirements Engineering (RE) and Testing. The goal is to improve the connection and alignment of these two areas through an exchange of ideas, challenges, practices, experiences and results. The long term aim is to build a community and a body of knowledge within the intersection of RE and Testing. One of the main outputs of the 1st workshop was a collaboratively constructed map of the area of RET showing the topics relevant to RET for these. The 2nd workshop will continue in the same interactive vein and include a keynote, paper presentations with ample time for discussions, and a group exercise. For true impact and relevance this cross-cutting area requires contribution from both RE and Testing, and from both researchers and practitioners. For that reason we welcome a range of paper contributions from short experience papers to full research papers that both clearly cover connections between the two fields.
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| 2. |
- Borg, Markus, et al.
(author)
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Summary of the 4th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering and Testing (RET 2017)
- 2018
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In: Software Engineering Notes. - : Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). - 0163-5948 .- 1943-5843. ; 42:4, s. 28-31
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Journal article (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The RET (Requirements Engineering and Testing) workshop series provides a meeting point for researchers and practitioners from the two separate fields of Requirements Engineering (RE) and Testing. The long term aim is to build a community and a body of knowledge within the intersection of RE and Testing, i.e., RET. The 4th workshop was co-located with the 25th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE'17) in Lisbon, Portugal and attracted about 20 participants. In line with the previous workshop instances, RET 2017 o ered an interactive setting with a keynote, an invited talk, paper presentations, and a concluding hands-on exercise.
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| 3. |
- Fagerholm, F., et al.
(author)
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Cognition in Software Engineering: A Taxonomy and Survey of a Half-Century of Research
- 2022
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In: Acm Computing Surveys. - : Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). - 0360-0300 .- 1557-7341. ; 54:11
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Cognition plays a fundamental role in most software engineering activities. This article provides a taxonomy of cognitive concepts and a survey of the literature since the beginning of the Software Engineering discipline. The taxonomy comprises the top-level concepts of perception, attention, memory, cognitive load, reasoning, cognitive biases, knowledge, social cognition, cognitive control, and errors, and procedures to assess them both qualitatively and quantitatively. The taxonomy provides a useful tool to filter existing studies, classify new studies, and support researchers in getting familiar with a (sub) area. In the literature survey, we systematically collected and analysed 311 scientific papers spanning five decades and classified them using the cognitive concepts from the taxonomy. Our analysis shows that the most developed areas of research correspond to the four life-cycle stages, software requirements, design, construction, and maintenance. Most research is quantitative and focuses on knowledge, cognitive load, memory, and reasoning. Overall, the state of the art appears fragmented when viewed from the perspective of cognition. There is a lack of use of cognitive concepts that would represent a coherent picture of the cognitive processes active in specific tasks. Accordingly, we discuss the research gap in each cognitive concept and provide recommendations for future research.
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| 4. |
- Unterkalmsteiner, Michael, et al.
(author)
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Summary of the 5th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering and Testing (RET 2018)
- 2019
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In: Software Engineering Notes. - : Association for Computing Machinery. - 0163-5948 .- 1943-5843. ; 44:1, s. 31-34
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Journal article (pop. science, debate, etc.)abstract
- The RET (Requirements Engineering and Testing) workshop series provides a meeting point for researchers and practitioners from the two separate elds of Requirements Engineering (RE) and Testing. The goal is to improve the connection and alignment of these two areas through an exchange of ideas, challenges, practices, experiences and results. The long term aim is to build a community and a body of knowledge within the intersection of RE and Testing, i.e. RET. The 5th workshop was held in colocation with ICSE 2018 in Gothenburg, Sweden. The workshop continued in the same interactive vein as the predecessors. We introduced a new format for the presentations in which the paper authors had the opportunity to interact extensively with the audience. Each author was supported by a member of the organization committee to prepare either an extensive demo, collect more data in form of a questionnaire or perform a hands-on tutorial. We named this new format X-ray session". In order to create an RET knowledge base, this cross-cutting area elicits contributions from both RE and Testing, and from both researchers and practitioners. A range of papers were presented from short positions papers to full research papers that cover connections between the two elds. The workshop attracted 27 participants and the positive feedback on the new format encourages us to organize the workshop the next year again.
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| 5. |
- Usman, Muhammad, 1978-, et al.
(author)
-
Compliance Requirements in Large-Scale Software Development : An Industrial Case Study
- 2020
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In: Lecture Notes in Computer Science. - Cham : Springer-Verlag Tokyo Inc.. - 9783030641474 ; , s. 385-401
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Regulatory compliance is a well-studied area, including research on how to model, check, analyse, enact, and verify compliance of software. However, while the theoretical body of knowledge is vast, empirical evidence on challenges with regulatory compliance, as faced by industrial practitioners particularly in the Software Engineering domain, is still lacking. In this paper, we report on an industrial case study which aims at providing insights into common practices and challenges with checking and analysing regulatory compliance, and we discuss our insights in direct relation to the state of reported evidence. Our study is performed at Ericsson AB, a large telecommunications company, which must comply to both locally and internationally governing regulatory entities and standards such as GDPR. The main contributions of this work are empirical evidence on challenges experienced by Ericsson that complement the existing body of knowledge on regulatory compliance. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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| 6. |
- Abdeen, Waleed, et al.
(author)
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An approach for performance requirements verification and test environments generation
- 2023
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In: Requirements Engineering. - : Springer. - 0947-3602 .- 1432-010X. ; 28:1, s. 117-144
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Model-based testing (MBT) is a method that supports the design and execution of test cases by models that specify theintended behaviors of a system under test. While systematic literature reviews on MBT in general exist, the state of the arton modeling and testing performance requirements has seen much less attention. Therefore, we conducted a systematic map-ping study on model-based performance testing. Then, we studied natural language software requirements specificationsin order to understand which and how performance requirements are typically specified. Since none of the identified MBTtechniques supported a major benefit of modeling, namely identifying faults in requirements specifications, we developed thePerformance Requirements verificatiOn and Test EnvironmentS generaTion approach (PRO-TEST). Finally, we evaluatedPRO-TEST on 149 requirements specifications. We found and analyzed 57 primary studies from the systematic mappingstudy and extracted 50 performance requirements models. However, those models don’t achieve the goals of MBT, whichare validating requirements, ensuring their testability, and generating the minimum required test cases. We analyzed 77 Soft-ware Requirements Specification (SRS) documents, extracted 149 performance requirements from those SRS, and illustratethat with PRO-TEST we can model performance requirements, find issues in those requirements and detect missing ones.We detected three not-quantifiable requirements, 43 not-quantified requirements, and 180 underspecified parameters in the149 modeled performance requirements. Furthermore, we generated 96 test environments from those models. By modelingperformance requirements with PRO-TEST, we can identify issues in the requirements related to their ambiguity, measur-ability, and completeness. Additionally, it allows to generate parameters for test environments
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| 7. |
- Abdeen, Waleed, et al.
(author)
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Challenges of Requirements Communication and Digital Assets Verification in Infrastructure Projects
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Context: In infrastructure projects with design-build contracts, the supplier delivers digital assets (e.g., 2D or 3Dmodels) as a part of the design deliverable. These digital assets should align with the customer requirements. Poorrequirements communication between the customer and the supplier is one of the reasons for project overrun. To thebest of our knowledge, no study have yet investigated challenges in requirements communication in the customer-supplierinterface.Objective: In this article, we investigated the processes of requirements validation, requirements communication, anddigital assets verification, and explored the challenges associated with these processes.Methods: We conducted two exploratory case studies. We interviewed ten experts working with digital assets fromthree companies working on two infrastructure projects (road and railway).Results: We illustrate the activities, stakeholders, and artifacts involved in requirements communication, requirementsvalidation, and digital asset verification. Furthermore, we identified 14 challenges (in four clusters: requirements quality,trace links, common requirements engineering (RE), and project management) and their causes and consequences inthose processes.Conclusion: Communication between the client and supplier in sub-contracted work in infrastructure projects is oftenindirect. This puts pressure on the quality of the tender documents (mainly requirements documents) that provides themeans for communication and controls the design verification processes. Hence, it is crucial to ensure the quality of therequirements documents by implementing quality assurance techniques
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| 8. |
- Abdeen, Waleed, et al.
(author)
-
Multi-Label Requirements Classification with Large Taxonomies
- 2024
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In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering. - : IEEE Computer Society. - 9798350395112 ; , s. 264-274
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Context and motivation: Classification aids software development activities by organizing requirements in classes for easier access and retrieval. The majority of requirements classification research has, so far, focused on binary or multi-class classification. Question/problem: Multi-label classification with large taxonomies could aid requirements traceability but is prohibitively costly with supervised training. Hence, we investigate zero-short learning to evaluate the feasibility of multi-label requirements classification with large taxonomies. Principal ideas/results: We associated, together with domain experts from the industry, 129 requirements with 769 labels from taxonomies ranging between 250 and 1183 classes. Then, we conducted a controlled experiment to study the impact of the type of classifier, the hierarchy, and the structural characteristics of taxonomies on the classification performance. The results show that: (1) The sentence-based classifier had a significantly higher recall compared to the word-based classifier; however, the precision and F1-score did not improve significantly. (2) The hierarchical classification strategy did not always improve the performance of requirements classification. (3) The total and leaf nodes of the taxonomies have a strong negative correlation with the recall of the hierarchical sentence-based classifier. Contribution: We investigate the problem of multi-label requirements classification with large taxonomies, illustrate a systematic process to create a ground truth involving industry participants, and provide an analysis of different classification pipelines using zero-shot learning. © 2024 IEEE.
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| 9. |
- Abdeen, Waleed
(author)
-
Reducing the Distance Between Requirements Engineering and Verification
- 2022
-
Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Background Requirements engineering and verification (REV) processes play es-sential roles in software product development. There are physical and non-physicaldistances between entities (actors, artifacts, and activities) in these processes. Cur-rent practices that reduce the distances, such as automated testing and alignmentof document structure and tracing only partially close the above mentioned gap.Objective The aim of this thesis is to investigate solutions w.r.t their abilityto reduce the distances between requirements engineering and verification. Twotechniques that are explored in this thesis are automated testing (model-basedtesting, MBT) and alignment of document structure and tracing (traceability).Method The research methods used in this thesis are systematic mapping, soft-ware requirements mining, case study, literature survey, validation study, and de-sign science.Results MBT and traceability are effective in reducing the distance between re-quirements and verification. However, both activities have some shortcoming thatneeds to be addressed when used for that purpose. Current MBT techniques inthe context of software performance do not attain all the goals of MBT: 1) require-ments validation, 2) checking the testability of requirements, and 3) the generationof an efficient test suite. These goals are essential to reduce the distance. We de-veloped and assessed performance requirements verification and test environmentgeneration approach to tackle these shortcomings. Also, traceability between re-quirements and verification suffers from the low granularity of trace links and doesnot support the verification of all requirements. We propose the use of taxonomictrace links to trace and align the structure of requirements specifications and ver-ification artifacts. The results from the validation study show that the solution isfeasible in practice. However, this comes with challenges that need to be addressed.Conclusion MBT and improved traceability reduce multiple distances betweenactors, artifacts, and activities in the requirements engineering and verificationprocess. MBT is most effective in reducing the distances when the model used isbuilt from the requirements. Traceability is essential in easing access to relevantinformation when needed and should not be seen as an overhead. When creatingtrace links, we need to consider the difference in the abstraction, structure, andtime between the linked artifacts
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| 10. |
- Abdeen, Waleed, et al.
(author)
-
Taxonomic Trace Links - Rethinking Traceability and its Benefits
-
Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Background: Traceability is an important quality of artifacts that are used in knowledge-intensive tasks. When projectbudgets and time pressure are a reality, this leads often to a down-prioritization of creating trace links. Objective:We propose a new idea that uses knowledge organization structures, such as taxonomies, ontologies and thesauri, asan auxiliary artifact to establish trace links. In order to investigate the novelty and feasibility of this idea, we studytraceability in the area of requirements engineering. Method: First, we conduct a literature survey to investigate towhat extent and how auxiliary artifacts have been used in the past for requirements traceability. Then, we conduct avalidation study in industry, testing the idea of taxonomic trace links with realistic artifacts. Results: We have reviewed126 studies that investigate requirements traceability; ninetey-one of them use auxiliary artifacts in the traceabilityprocess. In the validation study, while we have encountered six challenges when classifying requirements with a domain-specific taxonomy, we found that designers and engineers are able to classify design objects comprehensively and reliably.Conclusions: The idea of taxonomic trace links is novel and feasible in practice. However, the identified challenges needto be addressed to allow for an adoption in practice and enable a transfer to software intensive contexts.
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