Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-12T15:50:44Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 arquivo1986_1.pdf: 7023849 bytes, checksum: ba0e9dc1eb31198972dbb6ceaf580dba (MD5) license.txt: 1748 bytes, checksum: 8a4605be74aa9ea9d79846c1fba20a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008 / A engenharia de requisitos argumenta que, para o desenvolvimento de software complexo ser bem sucedido, é necessário que o processo de modelagem suporte mecanismos e ferramentas de rastreamento. Rastreabilidade de requisitos refere-se à habilidade de assegurar um alinhamento contínuo entre requisitos dos stakeholders e às várias saídas do processo de desenvolvimento de software. O processo de rastreamento de requisito descreve e segue a vida dos requisitos nas direções forward e backward (i.e. da sua origem, através do seu desenvolvimento e especificação, para sua subseqüente implementação e uso, e através de todos os períodos de refinamento e interação em qualquer uma dessas fases). Rastreamento de software é executado gerando, representando, armazenando e mantendo relações de rastreabilidade entre os artefatos de software tanto manualmente como automaticamente. Desenvolvedores de softwares têm usado agentes como uma forma de entender, modelar e desenvolver sistemas complexos mais naturalmente. Sistemas multiagentes (SMA) refletem a natureza descentralizada dos modernos sistemas distribuídos, dando suporte a situações dinâmicas e imprevisíveis nas quais se espera que o software opere atualmente, sendo apropriado para sistemas abertos nos quais seus componentes e padrões de interação mudam constantemente. O uso de agentes com uma maior dependência em conhecimento codificado, flexibilidade, adaptabilidade e autonomia, introduz novos desafios ao suporte de rastreamento de requisitos. As capacidades dos agentes e aspectos sociais devem ser consideradas. Uma contribuição neste campo é Tropos, um framework usado para modelar sistemas multiagentes. Ele faz uso das abstrações e conceitos das disciplinas organizacional e social para entender, modelar, analisar e projetar. Assim, Tropos fornece uma maior flexibilidade, e um conjunto de construtores de alto nível para tratar com um mundo operando mais nos princípios sociais do que nas regras mecanicistas. A flexibilidade, a adaptabilidade e a autonomia introduzidas pelos MAS apresentam novos desafios para as abordagens de rastreabilidade atuais. Nós advogamos que um modelo e um processo de rastreamento específico devem ser usados para tratar as necessidades específicas de um SMA de forma satisfatória. Nesta tese, nós propomos um Metamodelo de Rastreamento para facilitar a identificação das novas relações necessárias ao paradigma de agent system, the individual issues of each agent and their social aspects as well as the impact analysis when changes happen. The DBSitter-AS example will be used to illustrate how our proposal captures agent characteristics such as autonomy and cooperation

Incomplete and incorrect requirements might lead to sub-optimal software products, which might not satisfy customers’ needs and expectations. Software verification and validation is one way to ensure that the software products meets the customers’ expectations while delivering the correct functionality. In this direction, the establishment and the maintenance of traceability links between requirements and test cases have been appointed as promising technique towards a more efficient software verification and validation. Through the last decades, several methodologies supporting traceability have been proposed, where most of them realize traceability by implicitly exploiting existing documents and relations. Nevertheless, parts of the industry is reluctant to implement traceability within software development processes due to the intrinsic overhead it brings. This is especially true for all those light-weight, code-centric software development processes, such as scrum, which focus on the coding activities, trying to minimizing the administrative overhead. In fact, the lack of documentation finishes to hamper the establishment of those trace links which are the means by which traceability is realized. In this thesis, we propose a methodology which integrates traceability within a scrum development process minimizing the development effort and administrative overhead. More precisely we i) investigate the state-of-the-art of traceability in a scrum development process, ii) propose a methodology for supporting traceability in scrum and iii) evaluate such a methodology upon an industrial case study provided by Westermo.

Requirements traceability provides support for many software engineering activities like impact analysis, requirements validation and regression testing. In addition requirements traceability is the recognized component of many software process improvement initiatives. Requirements traceability also helps to control and manage evolution of a software system. This thesis presents a systematic review and a framework for requirements traceability. The systematic review is aimed at presenting fair evaluation of research concerning requirements traceability over the period 1997 – 2007. The systematic review aims at identifying probable gaps in research about requirements traceability and opens new horizons to explore. Moreover, two companies have been interviewed to understand the practice of requirements traceability in industry. After the analysis of industrial interviews these companies have been classified into two categories of traceability users. These categories are high-end traceability users and low-end traceability users. Based on the analysis of systematic review results and industrial interviews, this thesis presents a framework for requirements traceability called ‘Three Level Framework for Requirements Traceability (TLFRT)’. This framework is composed of three levels. The level 0 of this framework focuses on pre-RS traceability where as level 1 and level 2 focuses on post-RS traceability. The level 1 provide traceability for the functional requirements, where as level 2 provide traceability for non-functional requirements. TLFRT provides guidelines to a process that can be tailored to fit the needs of the high-end traceability users and low-end traceability users as well. This framework has been statically validated in two companies. The validation of TLFRT in industry resulted in compilation of lessons learned, which ensures that this theoretical framework could also be used in real industrial environment. The results of the research presented in this thesis are aimed at supporting requirements traceability by taking its current issues/challenges into account. / 0046(0)707381947

Purpose: An exploration into the application of pre-requirements specification traceability (pre-RST) practices in Information Systems (IS) projects within a retail setting. Research Design/methodology: A qualitative study in the interpretivist tradition applied within a single case study setting was selected. Findings: Awareness and value-perception emerged as the most significant challenge to overcome with recommendations for a well-considered organisational change management programme to address this. The potential impact on the trust relationship amongst requirements practitioners and participants is a factor to be addressed. More readily accessible requirements engineering guides that include pre-RST as a prominent aspect is required to raise awareness levels amongst practitioners. Practical implications: The research points to a need to raise awareness amongst practitioners through improved and more readily accessible requirements engineering guides that include pre-RST as a prominent aspect. It also highlights what to consider when embarking upon pre-RST, most prominently the need for carefully considered change management programme to tackle value-perception. Originality/value: Addressing the paucity in case study insights, this research provides an understanding of practice, awareness, value-perception and perceived challenges to pre-RST. Considerations for pre-RST implementation, including careful consideration for the trust relationship amongst requirements practitioners and participants is highlighted. Limitations: The case study was limited to eleven interviews in the retail industry and therefore may not be generalisable to other industries or general practice.

Requirements tracing is crucial for software engineering practices including change analysis, regression testing, and reverse engineering. The requirements tracing process produces a requirements traceability matrix(TM) which links high- and low-level document elements. Manually generating a TM is laborious, time consuming, and error-prone. Due to these challenges TMs are often neglected. Automated information retrieval(IR) techniques are used with some efficiency. However, in mission- or safety-critical systems a human analyst is required to vet the candidate TM. This introduces semi-automated requirements tracing, where IR methods present a candidate TM and a human analyst validates it, producing a final TM. In semi-automated tracing the focus becomes the quality of the final TM. This thesis expands upon the research of Cuddeback et al. by examining how human analysts interact with candidate TMs. We conduct two experiments, one using an automated tracing tool and the other using manual validation. We conduct formal statistical analysis to determine the key factors impacting the analyst’s tracing performance. Additionally, we conduct a pilot study investigating how analysts interact with TMs generated by automated IR methods. Our research statistically confirms the finding of Cuddeback et al. that the strongest impact on analyst performance is the initial TM quality. Finally we show evidence that applying local filters to IR results produce the best candidate TMs.

It is important to track how a requirement changes throughout the software lifecycle. Each requirement should be validated during and at the end of each phase of the software lifecycle. It is common to build traceability matrices to demonstrate that requirements are satisfied by the design. Traceability matrices are needed in various tasks in the software development process. Unfortunately, developers and designers do not always build traceability matrices or maintain traceability matrices to the proper level of detail. Therefore, traceability matrices are often built after-the-fact. The generation of traceability matrices is a time consuming, error prone, and mundane process. Most of the times, the traceability matrices are built manually. Consider the case where an analyst is tasked to trace a high level requirement document to a lower level requirement specification. The analyst may have to look through M x N elements, where M and N are the number of high and low level requirements, respectively. There are not many tools available to assist the analysts in tracing unstructured textual artifacts and the very few tools that are available require enormous pre-processing. The prime objective of this work was to dynamically generate traceability links for unstructured textual artifacts using information retrieval (IR) methods. Given a user query and a document collection, IR methods identify all the documents that match the query. A closer observation of the requirements tracing process reveals the fact that it can be stated as a recursive IR problem. The main goals of this work were to solve the requirements traceability problem using IR methods and to improve the accuracy of the traceability links generated while best utilizing the analysts time. This work looked into adopting different IR methods and using user feedback to improve the traceability links generated. It also applied wrinkles such as filtering to the original IR methods. It also analyzed using a voting mechanism to select the traceability links identified by different IR methods. Finally, the IR methods were evaluated using six datasets. The results showed that automating requirements tracing process using IR methods helped save analysts time and generate good quality traceability matrices.

Context: Requirements change commonly occurs during the software development lifecycle. Requirements traceability is one of the important techniques to support requirement change management and analysis, ensure quality and keep requirements consistent during development. We find that existing research mentioned various issues and challenges during practicing requirements traceability, and the practitioners show certain obstacles on the subject. Major existing work of the area focuses on requirements traceability processes, frameworks, and techniques to address certain issues accordingly. And we want to focus on and investigate the existing challenges to practice requirements traceability systematically. Method: We investigate the requirements traceability and its challenges through a systematic literature review (SLR) of various concepts and existing challenges of requirements traceability, and a survey of 7 Chinese small-and-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). With 7 interviews, we studied different traceability practices and situations with the surveyed companies under the possible impact of requirement change, development processes, tools, and other factors. And then we conducted conventional qualitative content analysis to identify and classify the challenges in practicing requirements traceability. Results: With the systematic literature review, we classified 14 categories of academic identified challenges. Through the collected data of the survey, we identified and discussed 6 categories of the requirement traceability challenges, involving costs, tools, awareness, documentation, etc. And we compared and discussed the connections and differences of the survey results with the literature for validation of our survey results and possible extension to the existing work. Through research, we may help the practitioners to deal with requirements change with traceability practice better by recognizing and preventing the obstacles. Our research may provide researchers with more information on practical situations. And in the future, researchers may study the traceability models more effectively aiming at addressing the existing problems.

In this thesis, a requirements traceability model is proposed in order to make efficient and effective change request impact analysis. The proposed model is a requirements &ndash / requirements traceability model. There are several researches regarding software requirements traceability problem. The main problem of these researches is that the proposed solutions can not be applied to software industry with affordable changes. However, current literature begins to see that describing all the software requirements in a huge black box is not so much applicable to today&rsquo / s more dynamic and bigger software projects, especially regarding change management. The proposed traceability model tries to be a solution to these problems. Change requests and business rules are two important and popular terms for today&rsquo / s software industry. The traceability model consists of three types of software requirements: data definitions, business rules and use cases. The traceability model proposes bidirectional traces between these types. Data definitions, business rules and use cases are related to each other and they all should be seen as parts of a software system which should work together to make the software system work properly. Empirical investigation is made on a real industrial software project. These types were configured in order to match to the project specific needs in a reconfigurable way. Experimental results show that the traceability model has an acceptable degree of correctness.

Submitted by Johnny Rodrigues (johnnyrodrigues@ufcg.edu.br) on 2017-09-13T17:33:44Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação Uma Abordagem para Representação e Rastreio de Artefatos - Dissertação - Arthur Marques.pdf: 3543236 bytes, checksum: 940b12e3ea8bc59723a107297df266fc (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-09-13T17:33:44Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação Uma Abordagem para Representação e Rastreio de Artefatos - Dissertação - Arthur Marques.pdf: 3543236 bytes, checksum: 940b12e3ea8bc59723a107297df266fc (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-12-15 / Rastreabilidade de Requisitos refere-se ao processo de rastreio de requisitos ao longo de todo o ciclo de vida de um software. Visto que um grande conjunto de informações é usado e produzido e tais devem ser rastreadas, ela é essencial ao processo de desenvolvimento de software. Não obstante, uma vez que a complexidade dos sistemas desenvolvidos cresce, a miríade de artefatos relacionados também cresce. Sendo assim, engenheiros de requisitos são encarregados de rastrear requisitos em diferentes níveis de abstrações. Neste contexto, vale ressaltar que não há um consenso acerca do processo de rastreabilidade e, como consequência, práticas de rastreabilidade de requisitos não podem ser unificadas em diferentes ambientes organizacionais. Propor uma abstração comum para rastreabilidade de requisitos e também identificar aspectos chave do processo de rastreabilidade são reconhecidos como notáveis tópicos de pesquisa dentre os grandes desafios da rastreabilidade de requisitos. Sendo assim, no presente trabalho, propomos uma Linguagem de Representação de Rastreabilidade (TRL), que provê abstrações para a rastreabilidade de requisitos. Tal linguagem é então explorada por um processo de rastreabilidade, centrado na mesma. Desta forma, ao discutirmos detalhadamente as fases do processo proposto, atores, responsabilidades, entradas e saídas esperadas bem como contratos e interfaces que regem tal processo, nós investigamos aspectos comuns do processo de rastreabilidade. A avaliação do presente trabalho considera que: (i) a representação proposta foi avaliada considerando critérios de legibilidade e redigibilidade, ou seja, quão compreensível ela é; e (ii) o processo proposto foi avaliado considerando sua performance e eficiência, isto é, quão bem o processo apoia atividades beneficiadas pela rastreabilidade de requisitos. Como resultados, observamos que a linguagem e suas construções foram avaliadas como de fácil leitura e escrita e que a linguagem é uma abordagem viável para abstrair rastreabilidade de requisitos. Além disso, observamos que o processo proposto possui melhor performance e eficiência quando comparado à um processo ad hoc. Dados os resultados observados, a abordagem proposta (linguagem e processo) fornece abstrações para o processo de rastreabilidade de requisitos bem como fomentar a discussão acerca dos principais aspectos do processo de rastreabilidade, desta forma, promovendo a rastreabilidade de requisitos portável. / Requirements Traceability (RT) refers to the process of tracing requirements through the software development life-cycle. It is essential for the software development process because a lot of information is used and produced and it should be kept related or traceable. Nevertheless , as the complexity of a system increases, themyriad of related artifacts also increases. Therefore, one is encumbered of tracing requirements through different abstraction levels. Moreover, there is not a consensus about the traceability process and, as a consequence, requirements traceability practices cannot be unified across different organizational settings. Proposing a common abstraction to requirements traceability and also identifying common aspects to the requirements traceability process have been recognized as remarkable research topics of the grand challenges of requirements traceability. Therefore, is this work, we propose a Traceability Representation Language (TRL), which provides abstractions to requirements traceability. Such representation is then exploited by a requirements traceability process centered on it. Thus, by thoroughly discussing process’ phases, activities, actors, responsibilities, and input/output artifacts as well as traceability contracts, which govern process’ phases and how they intercommunicate, we investigate common aspects of requirements traceability. The evaluation of the present work was twofold: (i) the proposed language was evaluated considering its readability and writability, i.e. how comprehensible it is; and (ii) the proposed process was evaluated regarding its performance and effectiveness, i.e. how well it supports requirements traceability tasks. As a result, we observed that the language’s constructions were evaluated as easily read/written and that it is a feasible approach to provide an abstraction to requirements traceability. Moreover,we observed that the proposed process improves the performance and efficiency of the requirements traceability process, while maintaining the same accuracy of other approaches. Therefore, the proposed approach (language and process) is feasible to address abstractions to requirements traceability as well as foster the discussion of major aspects of the requirements traceability process, thus portable traceability can be addressed, i. e. how requirements traceability techniques can be used across different projects or even organizations.

Context: In recent times, many organizations have started using agile software development methodologies instead of using traditional methodologies. The main reason for this shift is the ability of agile approaches to cope with changes in the requirements, customer satisfaction and assurance of on-time delivery of quality products [19]. Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a software development methodology that is considered to be one of the most prominent practices of eXtreme Programming (XP) (an agile methodology) [1][9][10]. Test-list in TDD is considered as a temporary repository in which test items are stored and later by using those items test cases are developed. Requirements Traceability is also a major problem in agile development mainly because of lack of formal requirements specification and frequent requirements change. Objectives: This study explores the utilization of test-list and possibility of using test-list for requirements traceability in TDD. This study describes concept of test-list, its formation and exploring its utilization in TDD. Methods for implementing requirements traceability in and identification of possibility of utilizing test-list for requirements traceability in TDD is also explored. Methods: Methods used in this study are systematic literature review, surveys and interviews. Systematic literature review was done using seven electronic databases, including Inspec, IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, Springer, Science Direct and Scopus. Studies were selected on the bases of preliminary, basic and advanced developed criteria. Survey was conducted using online questionnaire from TDD practitioners. Findings from literature review and surveys were used to develop interview questionnaires. Interviews were conducted from the same practitioners that were involved in surveys. Results: Based on the findings of literature review, questionnaire and interviews, we obtained TDD practices for test-list development and requirements traceability. Analysis was performed on results of SLR and questionnaire and possibility of using test-list for requirements traceability was identified. Based on the analysis of literature review and surveys, interview questionnaire were developed to further investigate the area of interest. We have found that in literature there is no defined method to develop test-list. and survey participants also confirms it. Majority of survey participants create test-list temporarily and informal. On question of whether test-list can be use for requirements traceability around 70% of participants are agree for its use. Interview respondents also confirm the findings of survey. Conclusions: Literature has not provided any test-list development method and practitioners also have no clear guideline to develop test-list prior to Test development. Systematic literature review and practitioner’s survey and interviews confirm it. Literature is also silent for any specific requirements change management or requirements traceability method in TDD. We identified requirements traceability practices in agile and management through literature and survey. After analysis of gathered data we found TDD lacks in test-list formalization, none of the study focuses on requirements traceability in TDD. In this study our contribution is exploration of test-list creation and utilization through literature and state of the practice; after practitioners feedback we also explored that test-list can be used for requirements traceability. / hasmkh@gmail.com, ibrararshad@gmail.com