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Berlin, Techn. Univ., Diss., 2005. / Computerdatei im Fernzugriff.

Current Requirements Engineering (RE) mechanisms used to measure Requirements Volatility (RV) employ textual-based artifacts for tracking changes to software requirements that primarily consist of detailed requirements documents that are difficult to understand by most software system stakeholders making it almost impossible for these stakeholders to gain a clear picture of how changes to a requirement will impact the total system overall. Research in the area of RE visualizations have proven that graphically representing software information in the form of visualizations can communicate complex information regarding requirements to system stakeholders in a manner that does not require an in-depth knowledge of RE technical documentation. This research used the concepts of Footprint Visualizations (FVs) to graphically represent software requirements as they evolved over time and analyzed these FV image artifacts to determine RV ratings. This work successfully demonstrated the use of FV analysis to measure RV. This work performed a qualitative study that compared the relationship between the RV ratings that were determined using the FV-based analysis methods proposed in this work to the RV ratings determined using traditional non-visual RV methods that relied on subject matter expert evaluation of a common requirements use case data set. The results of this study expanded the body of knowledge in the field of Requirements Engineering Visualization by demonstrating new analysis methods for measuring volatility in requirements use cases as they evolve over the software development life cycle process in order to aid system stakeholders in understanding the effects of changes made to requirements regardless of the individual stakeholders level of technical requirements documentation training.

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

In order to mitigate the ever-increasing trend in software failures with far reaching consequences, research has suggested close coordination of requirements engineering (RE) and testing. The literature also advocates the notion of requirements-based testing (RBT) focusing on checking both the quality attributes and implementation of requirements. As requirements reside in the environment comprised of certain problem domain phenomena, the environment assertions connecting some of these phenomena in the indicative mood play a critical part in determining the correctness of a software solution. Although several investigations emphasize the role of environment assertions in testing and QA activities, including RBT, current literature provides manual techniques of formulating environment assertions. Such an approach is extremely time consuming and highly dependent on an individual's domain knowledge. In addition, developers often struggle to formulate good assertions from scratch. To address this issue, in this thesis, we develop a boilerplate with certain placeholders that can be replaced with relevant attributes to formulate individual environment assertions. Leveraging this boilerplate, we further present a framework to capture environment assertions in an automated manner.

Software developers dedicate a major portion of their development effort towards testing and quality assurance (QA) activities, especially during and around the implementation phase. Nevertheless, we continue to see an alarmingly increasing trend in the cost and consequences of software failure. In an attempt to mitigate such loss and address software issues at a much earlier stage, researchers have recently emphasized on the successful coordination of requirements engineering and testing (RET). Jackson points out that requirements reside in the environment which is comprised of certain phenomena, also known as environment assertions, and a large number of software issues stem from faulty environment assertions. Current literature doesn’t provide any explicit emphasis on the environment assertions during QA activities. In order to address this gap, in this thesis, we present a detailed empirical study on the prominence of environment assertions in RBT and further propose an automated support to capture environment assertions.

Building systems that satisfy the given requirements is a main goal of software engineering. The success of this process relies largely on the presence of an adequate architectural design. Traditional paradigms deal with requirements separately from design. Our empirical studies show that crossing the boundary between requirements and design is difficult, existing tools and methods for bridging the gap inadequate, and that software architects rely heavily on experience, prior solutions, and creativity. Current approaches in moving from requirements to design follow two schools. One is architecture-centric, focused on providing assistance to architects in reuse. The other is requirements-centric, and tends to extend established development frameworks and employ mappings to transition from requirements to architecture. Jackson indicates that clear understanding of requirements (the problem) is crucial to building useful systems, and that to evolve successfully, their design must reflect problem structure. Taylor et al. argue that design is the central activity in connecting requirements and architecture. Nonetheless, existing approaches either overlook underlying structure of requirements or design considerations. This dissertation presents a novel theory enabling requirements structuring and design analysis through requirements refinement and refactoring. The theory introduces a refinement process model operating on four abstraction levels, and a set of refactoring operators and algorithms. The method works in small, well-guided steps with visible progress. The theory provides a basis for designers to analyze and simplify requirement descriptions, remove redundancy, uncover dependencies, extract lower-level requirements, incorporate design concerns, and produce a system decomposition reflecting the underlying problem structure. A design built on top of this decomposition is better suited for evolution than one created without explicit structural analysis. The theory is validated on an industrial-sized project, wherein a suitable system decomposition is produced and a comparison made to a conventionally-devised solution. Examples demonstrate that the theory handles changes incrementally. It is explained how the theory addresses the existing challenges in going from requirements to design and supports fundamental software engineering principles. The method is assessed against common validation criteria. The approach is compared with prominent related work.

Building systems that satisfy the given requirements is a main goal of software engineering. The success of this process relies largely on the presence of an adequate architectural design. Traditional paradigms deal with requirements separately from design. Our empirical studies show that crossing the boundary between requirements and design is difficult, existing tools and methods for bridging the gap inadequate, and that software architects rely heavily on experience, prior solutions, and creativity. Current approaches in moving from requirements to design follow two schools. One is architecture-centric, focused on providing assistance to architects in reuse. The other is requirements-centric, and tends to extend established development frameworks and employ mappings to transition from requirements to architecture. Jackson indicates that clear understanding of requirements (the problem) is crucial to building useful systems, and that to evolve successfully, their design must reflect problem structure. Taylor et al. argue that design is the central activity in connecting requirements and architecture. Nonetheless, existing approaches either overlook underlying structure of requirements or design considerations. This dissertation presents a novel theory enabling requirements structuring and design analysis through requirements refinement and refactoring. The theory introduces a refinement process model operating on four abstraction levels, and a set of refactoring operators and algorithms. The method works in small, well-guided steps with visible progress. The theory provides a basis for designers to analyze and simplify requirement descriptions, remove redundancy, uncover dependencies, extract lower-level requirements, incorporate design concerns, and produce a system decomposition reflecting the underlying problem structure. A design built on top of this decomposition is better suited for evolution than one created without explicit structural analysis. The theory is validated on an industrial-sized project, wherein a suitable system decomposition is produced and a comparison made to a conventionally-devised solution. Examples demonstrate that the theory handles changes incrementally. It is explained how the theory addresses the existing challenges in going from requirements to design and supports fundamental software engineering principles. The method is assessed against common validation criteria. The approach is compared with prominent related work.

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.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Drexel University, 2002. / Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 185-192).