ITC/USA 2010 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Sixth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 25-28, 2010 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / X-Tools is a collection of utilities for validation, translation, editing and report generation designed to enable the Flight Test Instrumentation (FTI) community to quickly adopt the XidML 3.0 meta-data standard. This paper discusses the challenges of developing such software that meets the current and future needs of the FTI community, and meets the increasingly high quality standards expected of modern software. The paper first starts by discussing the needs of the FTI community and the specific functional requirements of software. These include the ability to fit in with legacy systems, the ability to handle many tens of thousands of parameters, support for new networked-based technologies and support for hardware from any vendor. The non-functional requirements of FTI orientated software are also described and it is suggested that the key non-functional requirements include testability, modifiability, extensibility and maintainability. Finally, as a case study, the X-Tools from ACRA CONTROL are presented. The paper discusses their design, and the tactics used to meet the functional and non-functional requirements of the FTI industry. The paper then outlines how the rigorous quality standards were met and describes the specific mechanisms used to verify the quality of the software.

Requirement engineering is the most significant part of the software development life cycle. Until now great emphasis has been put on the maturity of the functional requirements. But with the passage of time it reveals that the success of software development does not only pertain to the functional requirements rather non-functional requirements should also be taken into consideration. Among the non-functional requirements usability, performance, safety and security are considered important. Further it reveals that there exist so many modeling and testing techniques for functional requirements but the area of non-functional requirements is still deprived off. This is mainly due to difficulty, diversity in nature and hard to express for being domain-specific. Hence emphasis is put to the development of these models or testing techniques. While developing these models or testing techniques it is found that all the four areas of usability, performance, safety and security are not only closely related but rather depend on one another up to some extent. This meant that they all should be tackled while keeping into consideration of the related from among them. For the purpose it seemed necessary to collect in one artefact all the available modeling and testing techniques related to the four core areas of non-functional requirements may be collected and compared. This work at first provides an understanding of the problem domain while describing aspects of the non-functional requirements. Then possibly the available related models or testing techniques are collected and discussed. Finally in the last they are compared with respect to diversified aspects.

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Yes / This paper introduces a novel method referred to as Enhanced Sequence Diagram (ESD) to support rigorous functional modelling of complex multidisciplinary systems. The ESD concept integrates an exchanges based functional requirements reasoning based on a coherent graphical schema, integrated with the system operational analysis based on a sequence diagram. The effectiveness of the method to support generic function modelling of complex multidisciplinary systems at the early conceptual design stages is discussed in conjunction with an electric vehicle powertrain example, followed by an assessment of potential impact for broader application of the method in the industry.

Este trabajo de tesis presenta lineamientos específicos para la aplicación de Ingeniería de Requerimientos Web al tratamiento de los RNF. Presenta procesos de Elicitación y Especificación de RNF Web y ofrece las plantillas diseñadas particularmente para la captura y especificación de los RNF en los procesos definidos. Si bien actualmente la Ingeniería de Requerimientos proporciona numerosas técnicas y herramientas para identificar, describir, validar y gestionar requerimientos, estos no son aplicados muy a menudo, en el desarrollo de aplicaciones Web. La madurez del proceso de ingeniería de requerimientos parece ser insuficiente, esa insuficiencia demanda nuevos enfoques o evolución de los actuales para el tratamiento adecuado de los RNF. Los RNF de los sistemas software no son un todo homogéneo, hay falta de consenso para responder a los interrogantes: ¿Qué son? ¿Cómo se clasifican dentro del contexto de desarrollo de software? y ¿Cómo se clasifican en el desarrollo de aplicaciones Web? Este trabajo parte de una revisión del estado de arte de los conceptos de RNF en la literatura de la Ingeniería de Requerimientos y establece como bases conceptuales que los RNF son requerimientos de calidad y son restricciones. Luego ofrece un análisis comparativo de seis enfoques existentes de desarrollo de aplicaciones Web para estudiar qué tratamiento aplican a los RNF, en el cual se pudo determinar que las metodologías de aplicaciones Web estudiadas: Contemplan los RNF, aunque se carece de consenso en su significado. No disponen de técnicas específicas para la elicitación de RNF, ni lineamientos uniformes para la especificación y la validación. No brindan técnicas que soporten el tratamiento de los RNF a lo largo del ciclo de vida. Hay carencia de consenso para establecer en qué fase del ciclo de vida de desarrollo se identifican los RNF. Hay RNF que no son identificados durante la fase de relevamiento y análisis. A partir de este análisis y dada la importancia de los RNF, se proponen procesos para la elicitación y especificación de los RNF Web (de calidad y restricciones), se describen las plantillas propuestas que dan soporte a los procesos y finalmente se presenta la validación de los conceptos y técnicas propuestos mediante un caso de estudio en un proyecto real. / This thesis introduces specifics guidelines to apply Web Requirements Engineering to the treatment of Non-Functional Requirements. It introduces the process of Elicitation and Specification for Web Non-Functional Requirements and offers spreadsheets designed to capture and specify Non-Functional Requirements in the defined processes. While at present Requirement Engineering has numerous techniques and tools to identify, describe, validate and manage requirements, these are not frequently applied in the development of Web applications. The maturity of the Requirements Engineering process seems insufficient; this insufficiency demands new approaches or the evolution of current process to the correct treatment of Non-Functional Requirements. Non-Functional Requirements of software systems are not homogenous; there is a lack of consensus to answer the following questions: What are Non-Functional Requirements? How they are classified within the context of software development? and How the Non-Functional Requirements are classified within the development of web software application? This thesis starts with a revision of the state of art of the concept of Non-Functional Requirements in Requirements Engineering literature and establishes as conceptual foundations that Non-Functional Requirements are quality requirements and restrictions. Then, there is a comparative analysis of six different existing approaches in Web application development to study what treatment applies to Non-Functional Requirements, in which methodologies of the Web applications studied: Non-Functional Requirements are considered, but there is no consensus in their meaning. There are neither specifics techniques for elicitation of Non-Functional Requirements nor uniform guidelines for the specification and validation. There are no techniques supporting the treatment of the Non-Functional Requirements along the lifetime cycle. There is a lack of consensus to establish within which phase of development lifetime cycle Non-Functional Requirements are identified. There are Non-Functional Requirements that are not indentified during requirement capture and analysis phases. After this analysis and the give importance of the Non-Functional Requirements, a process for the elicitation and specification of the Web Non-Functional Requirements (quality and restrictions) is proposed, exposed spreadsheets are described to support processes and finally, validations of the concepts and techniques are introduced applied to a real project.

Agile software development has become very popular around the world in recent years, with methods such as Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP). Literature suggests that functionality is the primary focus in Agile processes while non-functional requirements (NFR) are either ignored or ill-defined. However, for software to be of good quality both functional requirements (FR) and NFR need to be taken into consideration; lack of attention to NFR has been documented to be the cause of failure for many software projects. Hence special attention needs to be focused on NFR in Agile software development. By its very nature Agile processes require frequent changes but these changes are often not well documented. This is especially true of NFR in Agile processes. While functional requirements are carefully identified, NFR are often not properly elicited. Once NFR are identified they become the basis for reasoning and facilitation of design and development decisions. NFR also need to be validated through proper testing to ensure their quality attributes have been met in the final software product. This dissertation aimed at developing a methodology for addressing NFR in Agile processes. As such, the "NERV Methodology: Non-Functional Requirements Elicitation, Reasoning, and Validation in Agile Processes" was proposed. Several artifacts were created as part of this methodology and included: the NFR Elicitation Taxonomy, the NFR Reasoning Taxonomy, the NFR Quantification Taxonomy, and the Non-Functional Requirements User Story Companion (NFRusCOM) Card. Additionally the NERV Agility Index (NAI) was developed using the Agile Manifesto and its twelve principles. The NERV Methodology was validated using the 26 requirements of the European Union (EU) eProcurement Online System. Additionally the results obtained by the NORMAP Methodology in previous research, were used as baseline. Results show that the NERV Methodology was successful in identifying NFR, for 55 out of 57 requirements sentences that contained implicit NFR, compared to 50 for the baseline. This represented a 96.49% success rate compared to 87.71% for the baseline; an improvement of 8.78%. Furthermore the NERV Methodology was successful in eliciting 82 out of 88 NFR compared to 75 for the baseline. The elicitation success rate was 93.18% compared to 85.24% for the baseline; an improvement of 7.94%. Agility was validated using the same data set as above. Two experiments investigated project durations measured in 2-week sprint iterations, commonly used in Scrum. Results show that the first experiment, using the "FR and NFR Simultaneous Scheme" completed all FR and NFR scope in 24 sprints. The second experiment, using the "FR First Then NFR Scheme" consumed 26 sprints. The first agile scheduling scheme delivered all scope two sprints earlier than the second scheme; representing a saving of almost one month. Validation results showed that the NERV Methodology and its artifacts can potentially be beneficial for software development organizations for eliciting, reasoning about, and validating NFR in Agile processes.

The interaction of embedded systems with their environments and their resource limitations make it important to take into account properties such as timing, security, and resource consumption in designing such systems. These so-called Extra-Functional Properties (EFPs) capture and describe the quality and characteristics of a system, and they need to be taken into account from early phases of development and throughout the system's lifecycle. An important challenge in this context is to ensure that the EFPs that are defined at early design phases are actually preserved throughout detailed design phases as well as during the execution of the system on its platform. In this thesis, we provide solutions to help with the preservation of EFPs; targeting both system design phases and system execution on the platform. Starting from requirements, which form the constraints of EFPs, we propose an approach for modeling Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) and evaluating different design alternatives with respect to the satisfaction of the NFRs. Considering the relationship and trade-off among EFPs, an approach for balancing timing versus security properties is introduced. Our approach enables balancing in two ways: in a static way resulting in a fixed set of components in the design model that are analyzed and thus verified to be balanced with respect to the timing and security properties, and also in a dynamic way during the execution of the system through runtime adaptation. Considering the role of the platform in preservation of EFPs and mitigating possible violations of them, an approach is suggested to enrich the platform with necessary mechanisms to enable monitoring and enforcement of timing properties. In the thesis, we also identify and demonstrate the issues related to accuracy in monitoring EFPs, how accuracy can affect the decisions that are made based on the collected information, and propose a technique to tackle this problem. As another contribution, we also show how runtime monitoring information collected about EFPs can be used to fine-tune design models until a desired set of EFPs are achieved. We have also developed a testing framework which enables automatic generation of test cases in order verify the actual behavior of a system against its desired behavior. On a high level, the contributions of the thesis are thus twofold: proposing methods and techniques to 1) improve maintenance of EFPs within their correct range of values during system design, 2) identify and mitigate possible violations of EFPs at runtime. / CHESS / MBAT / ITS-EASY

<p>Model Based Testing (MBT) is a new-age test automation technique traditionally used for Functional Black-Box Testing. Its capability of generating test cases by using model developed from the analysis of the abstract behavior of the System under Test is gaining popularity. Many commercial and open source MBT tools are available currently in market. But each one has its own specific way of modeling and test case generation mechanism that is suitable for varied types of systems. Ericsson, a telecommunication equipment provider company, is currently adapting Model Based Testing in some of its divisions for functional testing. Those divisions haven’t yet attempted adapting Model Based Testing for non-functional testing in a full-pledged manner. A comparative study between various MBT tools will help one of the Ericsson’s testing divisions to select the best tool for adapting to its existing test environment. This also helps in improving the quality of testing while reducing cost, time and effort. This thesis work helps Ericsson testing division to select such an effective MBT tool. Based on aspects such as functionality, flexibility, adaptability, performance etc., a comparative study is carried out on various available MBT tools and a few were selected among them: Qtronic, ModelJUnit and Elvior Motes.This thesis also helps to understand the usability of the selected tools for modeling of non-functional requirements using a new method. A brief idea of modeling the non-functional requirements is suggested in this thesis. A System under Test was identified and its functional behavior was modeled along with the non functional requirements in Qtronic and ModelJUnit. An experimental analysis, backed by observations of using the new proposed method indicates that the method is efficient enough to carry out modeling non-functional requirements along with modeling of functional requirements by identifying the appropriate approach.Model Based Testing (MBT) is a new-age test automation technique traditionally used for Functional Black-Box Testing. Its capability of generating test cases by using model developed from the analysis of the abstract behavior of the System under Test is gaining popularity. Many commercial and open source MBT tools are available currently in market. But each one has its own specific way of modeling and test case generation mechanism that is suitable for varied types of systems. Ericsson, a telecommunication equipment provider company, is currently adapting Model Based Testing in some of its divisions for functional testing. Those divisions haven’t yet attempted adapting Model Based Testing for non-functional testing in a full-pledged manner. A comparative study between various MBT tools will help one of the Ericsson’s testing divisions to select the best tool for adapting to its existing test environment. This also helps in improving the quality of testing while reducing cost, time and effort. This thesis work helps Ericsson testing division to select such an effective MBT tool. Based on aspects such as functionality, flexibility, adaptability, performance etc., a comparative study is carried out on various available MBT tools and a few were selected among them: Qtronic, ModelJUnit and Elvior Motes.</p><p>This thesis also helps to understand the usability of the selected tools for modeling of non-functional requirements using a new method. A brief idea of modeling the non-functional requirements is suggested in this thesis. A System under Test was identified and its functional behavior was modeled along with the non functional requirements in Qtronic and ModelJUnit. An experimental analysis, backed by observations of using the new proposed method indicates that the method is efficient enough to carry out modeling non-functional requirements along with modeling of functional requirements by identifying the appropriate approach.</p>

A software product line (SPL) succeeds because we exploit the similarities between a set of software-intensive systems, together with an understanding of their differences, to reduce development cost, maintenance cost, and user confusion. In SPL engineering, reuse is planned, enabled, and enforced. It is through the development of a set of core assets that reuse is systematically practiced. Requirements assets enhance the effectiveness of reuse since engineers can work on the abstractions closer to the systems' initial concepts. Contemporary SPL requirements engineerin (RE) approaches often adopt the proactive model to build a relatively complete and stable asset base. In practice, the substantial up-front effort and the abrupt transition from existing practices associated with the proactive model present a prohibitive SPL adoption barrier for many organizations that could otherwise benefit. The extractive model overcomes these shortcomings by reusing existing products for the SPL's initial baseline. In this thesis, we present a framework for applying lightweight techniques to extract, model, and analyze a SPL's requirements assets. We define the notion of functional requirements profiles (FRPs) according to the linguistic characterization of a domain's action-oriented concerns, and show that the FRPs can be extracted from a natural language document on the basis of domain-aware lexical affinities that bear a 'verb - direct object' relation. We model the extracted FRPs by analyzing their semantic cases and by extending the orthogonal variability model (OVM). We contribute a set of heuristic rules for uncovering the variation dimensions and dependencies, and discuss merging the OVMs extracted from multiple sources. We relate functional profiles to quality requirements via scenarios, and manage requirements interactions via concept analysis. We present two applications of FRPs to support some other activities in SPL engineering. We conduct several empirical studies to evaluate our framework. The results show that our approach allows the engineers to identify the domain elements more easily and develop the domain models more systematically. Our work fills the void with respect to extracting a SPL's requirements assets, and the main thrust of our work is to promote a set of lightweight, low adoption threshold techniques as a critical enabler for practitioners to capitalize on the order-of-magnitude improvements offered by SPL engineering.