No description available.

The Listener is an automated system that unintrusively performs knowledge acquisition from informal input. The Listener develops a coherent internal representation of a description from an initial set of disorganized, imprecise, incomplete, ambiguous, and possibly inconsistent statements. The Listener can produce a summary document from its internal representation to facilitate communication, review, and validation. A special purpose Listener, called the Requirements Apprentice (RA), has been implemented in the software requirements acquisition domain. Unlike most other requirements analysis tools, which start from a formal description language, the focus of the RA is on the transition between informal and formal specifications.

No description available.

D.Ing. (Engineering Management) / The requirements discipline is at the heart of systems engineering, software engineering and business analysis. When a solution needs to be developed, built or bought that will be useful to the users and that will achieve the intended business goals, the problem needs to be understood before a possible solution can be developed. This process of understanding the problem that needs to be solved and what the solution should achieve is referred to as the requirements process. Requirements are the input to the solution development process. If the requirements are incorrect, the developed solution will not be useful. The purpose of this study was to discover the social behaviour of practitioners that causes the communication breakdowns during the requirements engineering process. Requirements emerge from the social interaction and communication between the requirements practitioner and the various stakeholders. The main problems with the requirements engineering process are communication and coordination breakdowns, as well as the lack of domain knowledge or understanding of the problem. These challenges are all related to the social interaction during the requirements engineering process that impacts the quality of requirements. Researchers have made significant progress in the development of methodologies. Tools and techniques are available for improving the quality of requirements. However, in practice, requirements are still produced with errors which then leads to unsuccessful solutions to problems. The requirements engineering process is executed within a social context. These social elements should be taken into consideration to improve quality. Based on the results collected from real-world practice as well as people’s behaviour in the real world, a complete understanding of the influence on the requirements process was derived. This understanding was used to identify the social elements required during the requirements engineering process. A socio-technical view is provided of the social and the technical activities that should be facilitated by the requirements engineering process. This framework integrates the required communicative activities with the traditional requirements activity. This socio-technical framework for the requirements engineering process was developed based on a survey. The aim of this framework is to overcome the social behaviour that causes communication breakdowns and impacts on the quality of the requirements. The research contributes to the existing requirements knowledge base. The socio-technical framework developed for the requirements process concerns the communication breakdowns continuously highlighted as a contributing factor to poor requirements, by providing the social activities required during the requirements process as guidance. Secondly, the knowledge acquired provides adequate data on requirements practice for future research. Specific focus areas for practitioners and managers on how to improve the requirements engineering process without the adoption of any new tools or methodologies are also included in the results. Additionally, practitioners’ behaviour was determined. By determining these interaction and relationship patterns, communication can be improved and made more effective.

yes / This paper presents a structured approach for systems requirements analysis that integrates use case modelling with a coherent flows based approach for describing interface exchanges based on the Interface Analysis Template. The approach is discussed in the context of current frameworks for requirements elicitation from the engineering design and systems engineering domains, and it is illustrated with an automotive case study. This illustrates the strength of the framework to support structured multi-domain and multi-disciplinary analysis of requirements for complex systems.

Software development teams are often geographically distributed from their customers and end users. This creates significant communication and coordination challenges that impact the effectiveness of requirements engineering. Travel costs, and the local availability of quality technical staff increase the demand for effective distributed software development teams. In this research an empirical study was conducted on the application of groupware to facilitate the requirements phase of the software engineering life cycle. The study considered the impact of the distributed work environment on requirements engineering process quality, as well as the effectiveness of requirements elicitation techniques when used in the distributed setting. Through the examination of the effectiveness of groupware tools, and requirements elicitation techniques, customer participation is found to be paramount for distributed requirements engineering. As requirements negotiation becomes more asynchronous in nature, it appears that customer participation in the elicitation process becomes very important for process effectiveness. Verbal communication barriers negatively effect customer participation. Such barriers cause customers to rely upon mediums such as email and text chat that are very good at reducing social distance, but are less rich in informational content. / Master of Science

A large number of software projects exist and will continue to be developed that have textual requirements and textual design elements where the design elements should fully satisfy the requirements. Current techniques to assess the satisfaction of requirements by corresponding design elements are largely manual processes that lack formal criteria and standard practices. Software projects that require satisfaction assessment are often very large systems containing several hundred requirements and design elements. Often these projects are within a high assurance project domain, where human lives and millions of dollars of funding are at stake. Manual satisfaction assessment is expensive in terms of hours of human effort and project budget. Automated techniques are not currently applied to satisfaction assessment. This dissertation addresses the problem of automated satisfaction assessment for English, textual documents and the generation of candidate satisfaction assessments that can then be verified by a human analyst with far less effort and time expenditure than is required to produce a manual satisfaction assessment. Validation results to date show that automated satisfaction methods produce candidate satisfaction assessments sufficient to greatly reduce the effort required to assess the satisfaction of textual requirements by textual design elements.

he digital revolution in the latter part of the twentieth century has resulted in the increased use and development of Cyber-Physical Systems. Two of which are Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) and Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM). Both are relatively new areas of interest to academia, military, and commercial organisations. Designing IVHM for a UAS is no easy task – the complexity inherent in UAS, with projects involving multiple partners/organisations; multiple stakeholders are also interested in the IVHM. IVHM needs to justify itself throughout the life of the UAS, and the lack of established knowledge makes it hard to know where to start. The establishment and analysis of requirements for IVHM on UAS is known to be important and costly – and for IVHM a complex one. There are multiple stakeholders to satisfy and ultimately the needs of the customer, all demanding different things from the IVHM, and with limited resources they need to be prioritised. There are also many hindrances to this: differences in language between stakeholders, customers failing to see the benefits, scheduling conflicts, no operational data. The contribution to knowledge in this thesis is the IVHM Requirements Deployment (IVHM-RD) – a method for a designer of UAS IVHM to build a tool which can consolidate and evaluate the various stakeholder’s requirements. When the tool is subsequently populated with knowledge from individual Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), it provides a prioritised set of IVHM requirements. The IVHM-RD has been tested on two design cases and generalised for the use with other designs. Analysis of the process has been conducted and in addition the results of the design cases have been analysed in three ways: how the results relate to each design case, comparison between the two cases, and how much the relationships between requirements are understood. A validation exercise has also been conducted to establish the legitimacy of the IVHM-RD process. This research is likely to have an impact on the elicitation and analysis of IVHM requirements for UAS – and the wider design process of IVHM. The IVHM-RD process should also prove of use to designers of IVHM on other assets. The populations of the design cases also provide information which could be useful to other designer and future research.

A rápida evolução e a ampla disseminação de tecnologias digitais estão mudando o contexto e o perfil dos aprendizes que hoje circulam naturalmente entre espaços físicos, espaços virtuais e espaços sociais diferentes, aprendendo em contextos formais e informais. Paradigmas educacionais atuais defendem a aprendizagem centrada no aprendiz que constrói seu conhecimento ao criar e desenvolver projetos, ao interagir com os objetos de estudo, com seus pares, com seus professores e mentores. A análise de requisitos etapa fundamental do desenvolvimento de uma ferramenta digital - concentra-se essencialmente em aspectos computacionais a partir da identificação de fluxos de entrada e saída e dos processos que a ferramenta deverá executar. Entretanto, a análise de requisitos é difícil de ser conduzida quando os conteúdos e inter-relações são complexos e dinâmicos. Recentemente, a abordagem de ecossistemas tem sido usada para entender ou modelar fenômenos que surgem da tecnologia e de seu uso. Propomos utilizar esta abordagem para conceber novas ferramentas digitais de aprendizagem ao analisar seus requisitos, ou para analisar ferramentas existentes. Assim, propomos neste trabalho uma definição e um modelo de Ecossistema Digital de Aprendizagem, que podem ser aplicados tanto na concepção de novas ferramentas educacionais quanto na análise para melhoria de ferramentas existentes. Um conjunto de artefatos, resultantes do detalhamento do modelo, é apresentado a fim de auxiliar na utilização do mesmo. A avaliação da aplicabilidade do modelo foi realizada por meio de sua utilização em estudos de caso de ferramentas educacionais desenvolvidas anteriormente. A aplicação do modelo evidenciou aspectos que não foram contemplados com abordagens tradicionais e permitiu levantar possíveis modificações e ampliações que podem levar a um estágio mais maduro do ecossistema. Os resultados obtidos com a aplicação do modelo na análise de ferramentas existentes apontam caminhos promissores para que esta estratégia seja usada na concepção de novas ferramentas educacionais de aprendizagem. / The rapid evolution and dissemination of digital technology are changing the learners context and profile. Learners move naturally between different physical spaces, different virtual spaces and different social spaces, engaging in learning activities in formal and informal contexts. Educational paradigms defend a learner centered approach, where learners construct their knowledge creating and developing projects, interacting with learning objects, with their peers, their teachers and mentors. Requirements analysis is a fundamental phase in the development of digital tools and concentrates essentially on computational aspects consisting on the identification of the tools input and output flows as well as processing. Nevertheless, requirements analysis is difficult to conduct when contents and relations are complex and dynamic. Recently, the ecosystem approach has been used to understand and to model phenomena that appear from the technology and its use. We propose to use this approach to conceive new digital learning tools, analyzing its requirements, or to use this approach to analyze existing tools. Therefore we propose in this research a Digital Learning Ecosystem definition and model that can be applied to the conception of new educational tools, as well as to analyze and improve existing tools. The detailed model includes a set of artifacts that can support its application. The model applicability evaluation was achieved by applying it on previously developed study cases. The model application showed some aspects that were not considered with traditional approaches and raised possible modifications and extensions that can lead to a mature stage of the ecosystem. The model application analysis of existing tools showed promising results and indicate that this approach can be used to conceive new educational learning tools.

Discute-se neste trabalho a importância de um método para análise técnica de uma dada infraestrutura visto a necessidade atual pela busca do aproveitamento de estruturas já existentes. Cada vez mais empresas buscam agregar serviços multimídia (voz, vídeo e dados) à sua estrutura corporativa, integrando a empresa como um todo, reduzindo custos e aproveitando a infraestrutura de comunicação existente. Com essa perspectiva, o trabalho propõe um método para avaliação técnica que determine, se uma infraestrutura instalada suportaria os requisitos necessários para oferecer os serviços da tecnologia IPTV, baseando-se na avaliação dos requisitos dos parâmetros de QoS quando implementado estes serviços. / The importance of a method is discussed in this work for technical analysis of a given infrastructure when the current necessity was seen by the search of the use of already existent structures. More and more enterprises look for collect services multimedia (voice, video and data) to his corporative structure, integrating the enterprise as a whole, reducing costs and leveraging the infrastructure of existent communication. With this perspective, this paper proposes a method for technical evaluation that it determines, if a given installed infrastructure will support the necessary requisites to offer the services of the IPTV technology, being based on the evaluation of the requisites of the parameters of QoS when these services were implemented.