Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-17T14:53:09Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Francisco de Assis.pdf: 1036916 bytes, checksum: f22914501d5f211716214a40fad5d08a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-03-30 / For several years, a lot of research is being done trying to find a solution for various problems concerning requirements engineering. Various approaches have pointed out that the requirements phase is the most important stage in the software development process. In general, requirements that are mistakenly elicited, analyzed and specified, gives rise to the development of low quality software. Non functional requirements gained little attention in the literature and are less understood but they are critical factors to the software development. When these requirements are badly elicited or not elicited at all, this gives rise to a difficulty in their treatment and their validation. Thus, we think that treating non functional requirements from the elicitation phase we contribute to a good software quality. This work deals with two aspects related with non functional requirements, namely how to elicit them and how to guarantee those requirements in conformity with a quality policy, even when new requirements or new technologies are adopted. As to attain this aim, we have elicited the requirements starting from a defined quality set necessary for medical applications. We defined a quality policy based upon these needs in such a way we could measure the conformity of non functional requirements definition specified in the requirements Document (RDs) with the desired quality, specified in the quality policy. / Ao longo dos anos, muitas pesquisas vêm sendo desenvolvidas na tentativa de se encontrar uma solução para os problemas relacionados à engenharia de requisitos. Existe uma unanimidade em certas abordagens, em ressaltar que a fase de requisitos se constitui na etapa mais crucial no processo de desenvolvimento de software. Freqüentemente, requisitos de software são mal elicitados, analisados e especificados, sendo estes fatores decisivos para o desenvolvimento de software de baixa qualidade. Requisitos não funcionais têm recebido muito pouca atenção na literatura, são pouco compreendidos mas são críticos no processo de desenvolvimento de software. O fato destes requisitos serem mal elicitados ou não elicitados os tornam mais difíceis de serem tratados e validados. Acreditamos que ao abordarmos os requisitos não funcionais desde a fase de elicitação, estamos contribuindo para a qualidade geral do software que será produzido. Este trabalho aborda dois aspectos relacionados aos requisitos não funcionais: como elicitá-los e como garantir a conformidade desses requisitos com uma política de qualidade, mesmo quando novos requisitos ou novas tecnologias forem adotadas. Para atingir este objetivo, elicitamos os requisitos a partir de um conjunto de necessidades de qualidade definidas para aplicações médicas. Definimos uma política de qualidade baseada nestas necessidades, de modo que possamos medir a conformidade das definições dos requisitos não funcionais especificados no Documento de Requisitos (DRs) com a qualidade desejada, especificada na política de qualidade.

Going offshore has become a norm in current software organizations due to several benefits like availability of competent people, cost, proximity to market and customers, time and so on. Despite the fact that Global Software Engineering (GSE) offers many benefits to software organizations but it has also created several challenges/issues for practitioners and researchers like culture, communication, co-ordination and collaboration, team building and so on. As Requirements Engineering (RE) is more human intensive activity and is one of the most challenging and important phase in software development. Therefore, RE becomes even more challenging when comes to GSE context because of culture, communication, coordination, collaboration and so on. Due to the fore mentioned GSE factors, requirements’ understanding has become a challenge for software organizations involved in GSE. Furthermore, Knowledge Management (KM) is considered to be the most important asset of an organization because it not only enables organizations to efficiently share and create knowledge but also helps in resolving culture, communication and co-ordination issues especially in GSE. The aim of this study is to present how KM practices helps globally dispersed software organizations in requirements understanding. For this purpose a thorough literature study is performed along with interviews in two industries with the intent to identify useful KM practices and challenges of requirements understanding in GSE. Then based on the analysis of identified challenges of requirements understanding in GSE both from literature review and industrial interviews, useful KM practices are shown and discussed to reduce requirements understanding issues faced in GSE.

Requirements reuse is based upon the idea that it is possible to reuse requirements from previous software development projects. Requirements reuse leads to efficiency and quality gains in the beginning of the development process. One of the obstacles for requirements reuse is that there is a lack of appropriate tools for it. This work approaches this hinder by identifying properties that are important, that is, that the properties represent something that has so much influence that it should be in a requirements reuse tool. These identified properties may then guide the development when building requirements reuse tools. In order to find the properties this work is conducted as a literature study where both tool-specific and non-tool specific articles were searched in order to elicitate the properties. The work focuses on properties present in both tool-specific and non-tool specific articles. This makes the result more reliable since two different sources have identified them. 18 verified properties were identified through this work.

The purpose of the study is to explore the possibility to use the experimental prototyping technique called Wizard of Oz as a requirements engineering technique in multimedia development with a focus on how to capture (and test) requirements for system responses in on-going GUI dialogues between user and system. The Wizard-of-Oz technique makes it possible to try interactive prototypes with users or in the development team without needing any programming to be conducted first. In a tourism context interactive prototypes made in the Wizard-of-Oz system called Ozlab were used to produce live answers to tourists. The prototyped information kiosk was offered as a complement to the already running tourist information website. The available surveys and web statistics regarding tourist information system could not provide non-functional requirements. Instead, three interviews and one observation were conducted, leading up to the four experiments where the WOz technique was tried as a requirements engineering technique in addition to the traditional data collection methods. The results of this study show how a graphical Wizard-of-Oz tool can be used as a complement to traditional requirements elicitation methods. The study also shows limitations to WOz based requirements engineering work; subject experts are needed in the wizard team, for example. The study also resulted in several developments of the experimental tool itself; the web feature was exploited much further than originally conceived by the Ozlab developers.

Context. The empirical study of Somerville in 2005 has shown that potential business benefits could be achieved by assessing and improving the Requirement Engineering (RE) process. However, currently there has not been an adequate instrument for practitioners to perform this work. Most known process assessment models such as CMMI and ISO do not pay intensive attention on RE whereas tailored models such as GPG and REPM do not cover the mentioned area extensively. Objectives. This thesis presents a conceptual research of RE process assessment in which the researcher aims to develop a practical model for evaluating the maturity of RE processes in industrial settings. Methods. A major part of this study consists of a systematic review and a literature review to explore all RE ―good practices‖ as a profound basis for the new model. Together with identifying potential activities, the two reviews also highly regarded the feasibility of certain practices and their context to assure the validity of the model. Conclusions. Based on the results of the reviews, Uni-REPM is formulated and introduced. The objective of Uni-REPM is twofold. Firstly, it is expected to be applicable for assessing the maturity of RE processes in various scenarios where an organization would use different development approaches. Secondly, it instructs practitioners with what to perform in RE processes and what they would benefit from such activities. As an assessment instrument, Uni-REPM serves a simple and low cost solution for practitioners to identify the status of their RE process. As a guidance tool, Uni-REPM is believed to lessen the gap between theoretical and practical worlds by transferring the available RE technologies from research to real work.

While several approaches exist for modeling goals and business processes in organizations, the relationships between these two views are often not well defined. This inhibits the effective reuse of available knowledge in models. This thesis aims to address this issue through the introduction of a Goal-oriented Pattern Family (GoPF) framework that helps constructing business process models from organization goals while expanding these goals, establishing traceability relationships between the goal and process views, and improving reusability. Methods for extracting domain knowledge as patterns, which are composed of goal model building blocks, process model building blocks, and their relationships, and for maintaining the patterns over time are also presented. The GoPF framework provides the infrastructure for defining pattern families, i.e., collections of related patterns for particular domains. The foundation of GoPF is formalized as a profile of the User Requirements Notation, a standard modeling language that supports goals, scenarios, and links between them. A method for the use of GoPF is defined and then illustrated through a case study that targets the improvement of patient safety in healthcare organizations. The framework and the extraction/maintenance methods are also validated against another case study involving aviation security in a regulatory environment. The GoPF framework is expected to have a positive impact on the scientific community through the formalization, evolution, and reuse of patterns in domain-specific business domains. From an industrial viewpoint, this framework will also help intermediary organizations (such as consulting firms) who are required to repeatedly create and document goal and process models for other organizations in their business domain.

This diploma thesis deals with the requirements engineering as one of the key areas of development of software applications. By requirements prospective users express their needs and goals which shall be achieved using the developed application. The correctness and completeness of the requirements is thus critical for the success of any software project. The main objective of this dissertation is determination of steps which must be made to improve quality of requirements on real software project in Czech financial institution. This is achieved by analysis of current requirements development process as well as by analysis of the sample of specific requirements. One part of the carried out analysis focuses also on the revision of actual settings of Atlassian JIRA application which is used for requirements management. Based on the analysis some crucial shortcomings are identified and steps for their elimination are introduced. This includes, inter alia, manual of how to specify correct requirements and checklists for different actors who work with requirements. The theoretical part gives a comprehensive overview of selected techniques and practices which are applicable for requirements gathering and analysis. Every mentioned technique is then evaluated from the perspective of its usability in the environment of large Czech bank. This overview can be useful both for junior analytics as a collection of best practices and for senior analytics as an overview of possible areas for their professional development.

Agile software development methodologies, such as Scrum, have gained tremendous popularity and proven successful in quickly delivering quality Functional Requirements (FRs). However, agile methodologies have not adequately identified, modeled, and linked Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) with FRs in early development phases. Researchers agree that NFRs have been generally ignored in conventional methodologies, especially ignored in agile environments. This dissertation develops a conceptual framework for NFR modeling in agile processes. The proposed Non-functional Requirements Modeling for Agile Processes (NORMAP) Methodology investigated the feasibility of identifying, linking, and modeling Agile Loose Cases (ALCs) with Agile Use Cases (AUCs) and Agile Choose Cases (ACCs). AUCs are newly proposed hybrid of use cases and agile user stories. ALCs are proposed—loosely—defined agile NFRs. ACCs are proposed potential solutions (operationalizations) for ALCs. A lightweight adapted version of the NFR Framework was developed including 25 important NFRs selected out of 161 for this study. Further, an enhanced risk-driven agile requirements implementation sequence (NORPLAN) was developed and visualized as a tree-like view (NORVIEW). The NORMAP Methodology was validated through developing NORMATIC--a Java-based agile visual modeling simulation tool and two case studies. NORMATIC utilized Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to parse requirement sentences and identify potential ALCs. The first case study utilized the Predictor Models in Software Engineering (PROMISE) dataset used in NFRs classification. NORMAP successfully parsed and classified ALCs for 529 out of 607 (87.15%) independent user requirements. The second case study utilized the European Union eProcurement System’s 26 functional requirements. NORMAP successfully parsed and classified ALCs for 50 out of 57 sentences that included possible ALCs (87.71%). Furthermore, requirements quality and project management metrics were used to calculate a risk-driven requirements implementation sequence using three priority schemes. Results showed that Riskiest-Requirements-First priority scheme planned requirements in 17 sprints--two months earlier than the Highest-Business-Value-First scheme (21 sprints) and one month earlier than the Riskiest-Requirements-Last scheme (19 sprints). Agile communities can potentially benefit from the NORMAP Methodology by utilizing a systematic and risk-driven lightweight engineering process to visually model and plan NFRs as first-class artifacts in agile environments.

In this report, we investigate how the methods developed for using in Semantic Web technology could be used in capturing, modeling, developing, checking, and validating of requirements specifications. Requirements specification is a complex and time-consuming process. The goal is to describe exactly what the user wants and needs before the next phase of the software development cycle will be started. Any failure and mistake in requirements specification is very expensive because it causes the development of software parts that are not compatible with the real needs of the user and must be reworked later. When the analysis phase of a project starts, analysts have to discuss the problem to be solved with the customer (users, domain experts) and then write the requirements found in form of a textual description. This is a form the customer can understand. However, any textual description of requirements can be (and usually is) incorrect, incomplete, ambiguous, and inconsistent. Later on, the analyst specifies a UML model based on the requirements description written by himself before. However, users and domain experts cannot validate the UML model as most of them do not understand (semi-)formal languages such as UML. It is well-known that the most expensive failures in software projects have their roots in requirements specifications. Misunderstanding between analysts, experts, users, and customers (stakeholders) is very common and brings projects over budget. The goal of this investigation is to do some (at least partial) checking and validation of the UML model using a predefined domain-specific ontology in OWL, and to process some checking using the assertions in descriptive logic. As we described in our previous papers, we have implemented a tool obtaining a modul (a computer linguistic component) that can generate a text of requirements description using information from UML models, so that the stakeholders can read it and decide whether the analyst's understanding is right or how different it is from their own one. We argue that the feedback caused by the UML model checking (by ontologies and OWL DL reasoning) can have an important impact on the quality of the outgoing requirements. This report contains a description and explanation of methods developed and used in Semantic Web Technology and a proposed concept for their use in requirements specification. It has been written during my sabbatical in Oviedo and it should serve as a starting point for theses of our students who will implement ideas described here and run some experiments concerning the efficiency of the proposed method.

The adoption of Health Information Systems (HIS) by primary care clinics and practitioners has become a standard in the healthcare industry. This increase in HIS utilization enables the informatization and automation of many paper-based clinical workflows, such as clinical referrals, through systems interoperability. The healthcare industry defines several interoperability standards and mechanisms to support the exchange of data among HIS. For example, the health authorities, Interior Health and Northern Health, created the CDX system to provide interoperability for HIS across British Columbia using SOAP Web Services and HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) interoperability standards. The CDX interoperability allows HIS such as Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems to exchange information with other HIS, such as patients clinical records, clinical notes and laboratory testing results. In addition, to ensure the EMR systems adhere to the CDX specification, these health authorities conduct conformance testing with the EMR vendors to certify the EMR systems. However, conformance testing can only cover a subset of the systems' specifications and a few use cases. Therefore, systems properties that are not closely associated with the systems (i.e. emergent properties) are hard, or even impractical, to assure using only conformance testing. System safety is one of these properties that are particularly significant for EMR systems because it deals with patient safety. A well-known approach for improving systems safety is through hazard analysis. For scenarios where the human factor is an essential part of the system, such as EMR systems, the System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) is more appropriate than traditional hazard analysis techniques. In this work, we perform a hazard analysis using STPA on the CDX conformance profile in order to evaluate and improve the safety of the CDX system interoperability. In addition, we utilize and customize a tool named FASTEN to support and facilitate the analysis. To conclude, our analysis identified a number of new safety-related constraints and improved a few other already specified constraints. / Graduate