The importance of a well-formulated set of software requirements contributing to a successful software development effort has been underscored in recent times. However, the software industry still faces a dearth of process models and artifacts populating the requirements generation process. Of those that do exist, they are often disconnected and narrowly focused, providing little structure to the requirement generation phase. Current methodologies advocate useful guidelines, but do not enforce them. To address these concerns, we introduce the "Synergistic Approach to Software Requirements Generation" — an approach composed of two components — a model and an interactive tool implementing the model. The first component is the Synergistic Requirements Generation Model (SRGM). The SRGM is complete with detailed processes spanning the entire software requirements generation phase. These processes have been identified and decomposed to low-level activities with the intent to improve clarity and understanding. The second component entails the An Interactive Tool for modeling the SRGM (itSRGM) codifying the structure dictated by the model. The tool enforces guidelines and provides visual representations of the progression of activities involved in the requirements generation process. / Master of Science

Over the past few years the real importance of requirements engineering has surfaced; hence, much research is now being directed towards generating quality requirements. However, the existing requirements generation models do not sufficiently stress the importance of identifying intermediate requirements documents. In addition, the models rarely specify how those documents support the objectives of the related activities. Moreover, the current models fail to depict how requirements are transformed, in terms of content and format, as we transition through the requirements engineering process. To address these concerns, we propose a comprehensive requirements generation model consisting of two main parts - (1) a refined set of activities (of the model) with explicitly enunciated objectives, and (2) a detailed characterization of requirements documents generated throughout the requirements engineering process. The proposed model refines the Requirements Generations Model (RGM) into detailed activities to reflect an appropriate level of abstraction, so that we can more accurately represent the intermediate development of the requirements documents. Furthermore, the objectives of the activities are identified, and subsequently, synchronized with the content and format of the documents produced by each activity. The evolution of the requirements is described, in terms of content and format, as the requirements documents pass through the successive activities of the requirements engineering process. / Master of Science

Despite advancements in requirements generation models, methods and tools, low quality requirements are still being produced. One potential avenue for addressing this problem is to provide the requirements engineer with an interactive environment that leads (or guides) him/her through a structured set of integrated activities that foster "good" quality requirements. While that is our ultimate goal, a necessary first step in developing such an environment is to create a formal specification mechanism for characterizing the structure, process flow and activities inherent to the requirements generation process. In turn, such specifications can serve as a basis for developing an interactive environment supporting requirements engineering. Reflecting the above need, we have developed a markup language, the Requirements Generation Markup Language (RGML), which can be used to characterize a requirements generation process. The RGML can describe process structure, flow of control, and individual activities. Within activities, the RGML supports the characterization of application instantiation, the use of templates and the production of artifacts. The RGML can also describe temporal control within a process as well as conditional expressions that control if and when various activity scenarios will be executed. The language is expressively powerful, yet flexible in its characterization capabilities, and thereby, provides the capability to describe a wide spectrum of different requirements generation processes. / Master of Science

Currently, the Usability Engineering (UE) and Software Engineering (SE) processes are practiced as being independent of each other. However, several dependencies and constraints exist between the interface specifications and the functional core, which make coordination between the UE and the SE teams crucial. Failure of coordination between the UE and SE teams leads to software that often lacks necessary functionality and impedes user performance. At the same time, the UE and SE processes cannot be integrated because of the differences in focus, techniques, and terminology. We therefore propose a development framework that incorporates SE and UE efforts to guide current software development. The framework characterizes the information exchange that must exist between the UE and SE teams during software development to form the basis of the coordinated development framework. The UE Scenario-Based Design (SBD) process provides the basis for identifying UE activities. Similarly, the Requirements Generation Model (RGM), and Structured Analysis and Design are used to identify SE activities. We identify UE and SE activities that can influence each other, and identify the high-level exchange of information that must exist among these activities. We further examine these interactions to gain a more in-depth understanding as to the precise exchange of information that must exist among them. The identification of interacting activities forms the basis of a coordinated development framework that incorporates and synchronizes the UE and SE processes. An examination of the Incremental and Spiral models as they relate to the SBD is provided, and outlines how our integration framework can be composed. Using the results of and insights gained from our research, we also suggest additional avenues for future work. / Master of Science

In recent years, the requirements engineering community has proposed a number of models for the generation of a well-formulated, complete set of requirements. However, these models are often highly abstract or narrowly focused, providing only pieces of structure and parts of guidance to the requirements generation process. Furthermore, many of the models fail to identify methods that can be employed to achieve the activity objectives. As a consequence of these problems, the requirements engineer lacks the necessary guidance to effectively apply the requirements generation process, and thus, resulting in the production of an inadequate set of requirements. To address these concerns, we propose the expanded Requirements Generation Model (x-RGM), which consists of activities at a more appropriate level of abstraction. This decomposition of the model ensures that the requirements engineer has a clear understanding of the activities involved in the requirements generation process. In addition, the objectives of all the activities defined by the x-RGM are identified and explicitly stated so that no assumptions are made about the goals of the activities involved in the generation of requirements. We also identify sets of methods that can be used during each activity to effectively achieve its objectives. The mapping of methods to activities guides the requirements engineer in selecting the appropriate techniques for a particular activity in the requirements engineering process. Furthermore, we prescribe small subsets of methods for each activity based on commonly used selection criteria such that the chosen criterion is optimized. This list of methods is created with the intention of simplifying the task of choosing methods for the activities defined by the x-RGM that best meet the selection criterion goal / Master of Science

Business process modeling is utilized by organizations for defining and reengineering their business processes. On the other hand, software requirements analysis activities are performed for determining the system boundaries, specifying software requirements using system requirements and resolving conflicts between requirements. From this point of view, these two activities are considered in different disciplines. An organization requiring its business processes to be defined and supported with information systems would benefit from performing business process modeling and requirements analysis concurrently. In this study, an approach enabling concurrent execution of business process modeling and requirements analysis is developed. The approach includes two business process modeling notations adapted to the research needs, a process defining the steps for implementing the approach and the requirements generation tool that generates natural language specification documents by using business process models. Within this study, two case studies are introduced / one describing the development of the approach and the other exploring if the total efficiency of performing business process modeling and requirements analysis activites would be increased by using the approach.

En esta tesis doctoral se presenta una propuesta de Ingeniería de Requisitos (IR) para líneas de productos que integra modelos de análisis del dominio y requisitos en lenguaje natural: (1) se estudia la reutilización de requisitos textuales, definiendo un método de IR basado en reutilización de requisitos en lenguaje natural, denominado SIREN, validado en entornos industriales; se propone además una extensión de SIREN para desarrollo global de software, junto con un repositorio de amenazas y salvaguardas para la IR que se lleva a cabo en entornos globalizados; (2) se describe una evolución de SIREN con el objetivo de modelar el dominio de una línea de productos, los sistemas teleoperados para mantenimiento de cascos de buques; y (3) se plantea la integración de modelos de ingeniería del software con especificaciones de requisitos en lenguaje natural, en este orden, implicando la generación de requisitos textuales a partir de modelos. / In this doctoral thesis an approach to requirements engineering (RE) for product lines integrating domain analysis models and natural language requirements is formulated: (1) the SIREN method is defined, an RE method based on natural language requirements reuse, which has been validated in industrial environments; furthermore, a method extending SIREN to the global software development is defined based on a risks and safeguards repository concerning RE when performed in distributed environments; (2) an evolution of SIREN is proposed with the intent of modeling the software product line of the teleoperated systems for ship hull maintenance; and (3) the interest of the generation of textual requirements starting from software engineering models is corroborated and a flattening correspondence is defined which maps the domain analysis models to natural language requirements.