The need for complex software to coordinate the activities of modern enterprises has become a necessity for their success. As business sectors are rapidly reshaped, organizations become global, and consumers have a seemingly endless degree of choice, these competitive conditions require software engineers to incorporate consumer values—personal judgments based on comparative, preferential experiences—into the design of such supporting software. Traditional modes of thinking, whose primary focus was often on economic value, are being left behind, as consumers are requiring more qualitative experiences than ever before. And while the impact of quantitative values on IT is readily seen and acknowledged within software engineering, such qualitative values, and in particular consumer values, have been researched to a lesser degree. To foster greater alignment between business and its supporting IT infrastructure, requirements engineers operating under such conditions need new means to both capture real preferences of consumers and then relate such preferences to requirements for next-generation software.  To address this problem, this thesis establishes a conceptual link between the preferences of consumers and system requirements by systematically accommodating the variations between them. It accomplishes this by following a design science research paradigm to support the development of the works' primary artifact—the Consumer Preference-aware Meta-Model (CPMM). CPMM is designed to improve alignment between business and IT by both capturing the real preferences of consumers and then relating such preferences to the requirements engineering process. It relies on research contributions within three areas in information systems—Business Strategy, Enterprise Architecture, and Requirements Engineering—whose relationships to consumer values have been under-researched and under-applied. These support the design and development of CPMM and its relevance to the problem area. The benefits it provides towards solving the problem are then exemplified in three demonstrations: via logical mappings between CPMM and a common approach to business strategy (strategy maps/balanced scorecards); the application of CPMM to generate requirements for a Patient Health Record (PHR) system; and an empirical study of the development of a consumer preference-based system for online education for foreign and domestic students at Swedish universities. / I moderna företag har behovet av komplex mjukvara för att samordna verksamheten blivit en nödvändighet för att uppnå framgång. Då branscher snabbt omformas, organisationer globaliseras och konsumenter ges till synes oändliga valmöjligheter; krävs att mjukvaruingenjörer införlivar konsumentvärden - personliga bedömningar baserade på jämförande förmånliga upplevelser - i utformningen av dylik stödjande mjukvara. Traditionella sätt att tänka, primärt fokuserade på ekonomiska värden; hamnar lätt på efterkälken eftersom konsumenterna i högre utsträckning kräver alltmer kvalitativa upplevelser. Och medan det kvantitativa genomslaget av IT lätt kan observears och bekräftas med mjukvaruvaruteknik; är forskning kring kvalitativa värden, särskilt konsumentvärden, betydligt ovanligare. För att underlätta överensstämmelsen mellan företag och dess stödjande IT-infrastruktur, måste kravställande ingenjörer som arbetar under dessa förhållanden hitta sätt att fånga konsumenternas verkliga preferenser, och sedan relatera dessa till kraven för nästa generations programvara. För att lösa detta problem, fastställer denna avhandling ett begreppsmässigt samband mellan konsumentpreferenser och systemkrav genom att systematiskt tillmötesgå och jämka skillnader mellan dem. Detta åstadkoms genom att använda ett designvetenskapligt forskningsparadigm som också är avhandlingens primära artefakt; the Consumer Preference-aware Meta-Model (CPMM). CPMM är utformat för att förbättra anpassningen mellan affärsmässighet och IT genom att fånga upp konsumenternas verkliga preferenser och relatera dessa till kravhanteringsprocessen. CPMM bygger på forskningsinsatser inom tre informationssystemområden; affärsstrategi, verksamhetsarkitektur och kravhantering; vars relation till kundvärdering hittills är tämligen outforskad. Dessa tre områden stödjer både utformning och utveckling av CPMM och dess relevans för problemområdet. Fördelarna med CPMM exemplifieras slutligen i tre demonstrationer: genom logiska mappningar mellan CPMM och redan etablerade tillvägagångssätt för affärsstrategier (strategikartor/balanserade styrkort); genom tillämpning av CPMM för att generera krav på patientjournalsystem (PHR); samt en empirisk studie av utvecklingen av en konsumentpreferensbaserat system för online-utbildning riktat till både utländska och svenska studenter vid svenska lärosäten.

Context and background: Requirements engineering(RE) is a first and a very important phase in any software development which helps in building a suitable and customer satisfactory product. In the past few years, the use of Agile software development has become popular in the industry. Customer communication plays an important role in any software development life cycle. Customers state the requirements needed to develop a product in the Requirements Engineering phase. A project is likely to fail due to problems in customer communication during the RE phase. Objective: This thesis aims to study the Customer communication challenges in Agile requirements engineering, prioritize these challenges, and also find out the mitigation strategies to overcome these challenges. Research Method: A systematic mapping study is conducted to find out the customer communication challenges. Based on the data collected from the systematic mapping study, a survey is conducted to find out the mitigation strategies to overcome the customer communication challenges faced in the RE phase and also prioritize these challenges. Results: Based on the data collected from the systematic mapping study, a total of 18 customer communication challenges are identified. In the second step, a survey is conducted based on the identified challenges. The prioritization of these challenges is done by calculating the risk analysis of the challenges from the survey data. And finally, mitigation strategies are mentioned to overcome all the identified 18 challenges.

For many software projects, keeping requirements on track needs an effective and efficient path from data to decision. Visual analytics creates such a path that enables the human to extract insights by interacting with the relevant information. While various requirements visualization techniques exist, few have produced end-to-end values to practitioners. In this dissertation, we advance the literature on visual requirements analytics by characterizing its key components and relationships in a framework. We follow the goal-question-metric paradigm to define the framework by teasing out five conceptual goals (user, data, model, visualization, and knowledge), their specific operationalizations, and their interconnections. The framework allows us to not only assess existing approaches, but also create tool enhancements in a principled manner. We evaluate our enhanced tool supports both qualitatively and quantitatively. First, we evaluate our tool supports qualitatively through a case study where massive, heterogeneous, and dynamic requirements are processed, visualized, and analyzed. Working together with practitioners on a contemporary software project within its real-life context leads to the main ending that visual analytics can help tackle both open-ended visual exploration tasks and well-structured visual exploitation tasks in requirements engineering. In addition, the study helps the practitioners to reach actionable decisions in a wide range of areas relating to their project, ranging from theme and outlier identification, over requirements tracing, to risk assessment. Overall our work illuminates how the data-to-decision analytical capabilities could be improved by the increased interactivity of requirements visualization. Although many new visual analytics tools, techniques and methods are being developed, still there is a lack of understanding of how to evaluate the performance of such tools. We conducted an experiment to assess the performance (time and correctness) of our visual analytics tool support in solving requirements engineering tasks. Our study provides initial evidence and insights for visual analytics in requirements engineering and sheds light on many challenging open questions.

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Since their creation, CubeSats have become a valuable educational tool for university science and engineering programs. Unfortunately, while aerospace companies invest resources to develop verification and validation methodologies based on larger-scale aerospace projects, university programs tend to focus resources on spacecraft development. This paper looks at two different types of methodologies in an attempt to improve CubeSat reliability: generating software requirements and utilizing system and software architecture modeling. Both the Consortium Requirements Engineering (CoRE) method for software requirements and the Monterey Phoenix modeling language for architecture modeling were tested for usability in the context of PolySat, Cal Poly's CubeSat research program. In the end, neither CoRE nor Monterey Phoenix provided the desired results for improving PolySat's current development procedures. While a modified version of CoRE discussed in this paper does allow for basic software requirements to be generated, the resulting specification does not provide any more granularity than PolySat's current institutional knowledge. Furthermore, while Monterey Phoenix is a good tool to introduce students to model-based systems engineering (MBSE) concepts, the resulting graphs generated for a PolySat specific project were high-level and did not find any issues previously discovered through trial and error methodologies. While neither method works for PolySat, the aforementioned results do provide benefits for university programs looking to begin developing CubeSats.

Several studies have applied recommender technologies to support requirements engineering activities. As in other application areas of recommender systems (RS), many studies have focused on the algorithms’ prediction accuracy, while there have been limited discussions around users’ interactions with the systems. Since recommender systems are designed to aid users in information retrieval, they should be assessed not just as recommendation algorithms but also from the users’ perspective. In contrast to accuracy measures, user-related issues can only be effectively investigated via empirical studies involving real users. Furthermore, researchers are becoming increasingly aware that the effectiveness of the systems goes beyond recommendation accuracy, as many factors can be relevant to their adoption besides accuracy. To better understand recommender systems in RE, it has become necessary to explore them from users’ perspectives. Consequently, this research evaluates a feature recommender system from users’ perspectives adopting the “Recommender systems’ Quality of user experience” (ResQue) model - a user-centered evaluation model from the RS field. This was done by designing a content-based feature recommender system and then assessing it from the users’ view point. A between-subjects user study was conducted involving two groups of participants, an experimental and a control group. The experimental group interacted with the feature recommender system while developing a list of software requirements for a software product (an antivirus software). In contrast, the control group performed the same task without receiving support from the recommender. After completing the task, both groups completed a post-task evaluation questionnaire, including questions about their experiences and opinions about the task they completed. In addition, participants in the experimental group rated their perceptions of various aspects of the recommender; question items were adapted from the ResQue questionnaire. Users’ subjective evaluation of the recommender was investigated using the ResQue constructs - perceived system qualities, user beliefs, user attitudes, and behavioral intentions. Additionally, the impact of recommendations on the requirements elicitation process was assessed in terms of the process and outcome level measures. Possible qualitative differences were also examined. Users' preferences were identified, and possible HCI issues requiring attention in recommender systems used in RE are discussed.

[pt] Com os avanços de novas tecnologias de desenvolvimento de software, a mineração de texto tem ganho protagonismo na área de Engenharia de Requisitos (ER), já que a rede (Web) possibilita o acesso a grandes quantidades de informação. A utilização de técnicas de visualização ganha importância nesse sentido, porque permite agilizar a descoberta de conhecimento com visualizações adequadas. Neste trabalho disponibiliza-se uma estratégia para que o engenheiro de requisitos consiga acessar às visualizações desenvolvidas por pesquisas no uso de mineração para elicitação de requisitos. Uma revisão da literatura possibilitou a proposta de classificação de tarefas de mineração e visualizações associadas, especialmente na ER. Esta classificação constitui a base de conhecimento de um software (Biblioteca Digital) que organiza e filtra informações de acordo com a inter-relação entre tarefas e categorias, mostrando as pesquisas que sustentam cada relação. Para a avaliação da estratégia, com foco no software, foi executado uma avaliação que mostra o potencial da abordagem para agilizar a obtenção de conhecimentos por parte do engenheiro de requisitos. / [en] With advances in new technologies available for software development, text mining has grown in importance in the area of Requirements Engineering (ER) due to the availability of large amounts of information on the Web. The use of visualization techniques gains importance in this regard, since it allows the speedup of knowledge discovery with appropriate visualizations. This work provides a strategy for the requirements engineer to gain access, in an organized manner, to results of research in text mining with visualization in ER. For implementation, the classification of mining tasks and the visualizations categories in ER were summarized from the literature. This classification forms the knowledge base of a software (Digital Library) that organizes and filters information according to the interrelation between tasks and categories, showing the research that supports each relationship. For the evaluation of the strategy, with a focus on software, an evaluation was carried out that shows the potential of the approach to expedite the knowledge engineer s requirements.

[pt] Em geral, os Requisitos Não-funcionais (RNFs) só são tratados nas atividades relacionadas à arquitetura do software, e, muitas vezes, apenas durante a implementação. Essa situação resulta em custos mais altos e menor qualidade do software. Este trabalho estuda mecanismos para ressaltar os RNFs durante as atividades de construção de requisitos. A escolha dos requisitos pelos diversos interessados, dentro do processo de elicitação de requisitos do software através do consenso, é um problema complexo. Representar e estruturar dinâmicas de grupos, que são compostas por ações humanas, é um desafio. Durante o processo de decisão em grupo ocorre o debate de um conjunto de idéias, nem sempre expostas de maneira clara e nem sempre entendidas por todos da mesma forma. O debate envolve vários perfis de participantes, com pontos de vista distintos, e por vezes conflitantes. Sendo tais diferenças, em contra partida, fundamentais para a qualidade da decisão em grupo, pois as ideias são analisadas sob vários ângulos. Um processo colaborativo de construção de RNFs e seu suporte computacional são propostos. A abordagem de Negociação - Colaboração é reutilizada para trabalhar especificamente RNFs. Leva em consideração não apenas a construção dos RNFs em si, mas também a construção de suas interdependências. Tais interdependências entre os requisitos impactam a própria decisão sobre os RNFs a serem construídos. A avaliação do processo foi apoiada por um software desenvolvido para suporte, ao mesmo tempo, de mecanismos de Negociação-Colaboração e de atividades de especificação de RNFs. O software é assíncrono e distribuído geograficamente, facilitando a comunicação em grupo, mesmo que com membros distantes fisicamente. Foram realizadas três atividades avaliativas e os resultados produzidos demonstraram indícios positivos ao uso do processo na construção de RNFs. Para cada um dos projetos usados nas avaliações, foi produzida uma lista de RNFs cujo a consistência foi julgada pelos participantes envolvidos como suficientemente satisfatória. O número de RNFs foi dobrado nas três atividades de construção, revelando uma maior cobertura relativa aos atributos de qualidade inicialmente elencados para os softwares. / [en] Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) are often managed late, either during design or, more often, just at implementation. This trend results in higher costs and low-quality software. Our work studies mechanisms to support RNFs, based on the collaborative dynamics of a negotiation process, during the requirements construction activities As such, we created a collaborative strategy for the construction of NFRs. An evaluation was conducted using a tailored tool built to implement the proposed Negotiation-Collaboration mechanisms. The choice of requirements by various stakeholders, within the process of eliciting software requirements through consensus, is a complex problem. Representing and structuring group dynamics, which are composed of human actions, is a challenge. During the group decision-making process, a set of ideas is debated, not always clearly expressed and not always understood by everyone in the same way. The debate involves several profilesq of participants, with different and sometimes conflicting points of view. Such differences, however, are fundamental to the quality of the group decision, as the ideas are analyzed from various perspectives. A collaborative strategy for building RNFs and their computational support is proposed. The Negotiation-Collaboration approach is reused to work specifically with RNFs. It takes into account not only the construction of the RNFs themselves, but also the construction of their interdependencies. Such interdependencies between the requirements impact the decision on the RNFs to be built. The strategy evaluation was supported by software developed to support, at the same time, Negotiation-Collaboration mechanisms and RNFs specification activities. The software is asynchronous and geographically distributed, facilitating group communication, even with physically distant members. Three evaluative activities were carried out, and the results showed positive indications for the use of the strategy in the construction of RNFs. For each of the projects used in the evaluations, a list of RNFs was produced, whose consistency was judged by the participants involved to be sufficiently satisfactory. The number of RNFs was duplicated in the three construction activities, revealing greater coverage regarding the quality attributes initially listed for the software.

Two of the main needs when developing an information system for an organization are that system analysts know and understand the application domain and that the system properly supports the business processes of the organization. Consequently, elicitation of system requirements from business process models has been acknowledged as a suitable activity to deal with that needs. In addition, system requirements must be linked to subsequent development stages. However, system analysts can face many challenges when performing these activities. They may have problems communicating with customer stakeholders and may need to analyse and operationalize the purpose of the information system. Furthermore, system analysts must bridge the gap between business and system domains for specification of system requirements, specify different types of system requirements and guarantee that their specification is precise, consistent and homogeneous. In relation to object-oriented conceptual modelling-based information system development, system analysts must also avoid potential problems that may arise when a conceptual schema is created from system requirements as part of their link with subsequent development stages. For example, a conceptual schema can be incomplete and/or inconsistent if it is not properly managed. As a solution, this thesis presents a methodological approach for business process-based requirements specification and object-oriented conceptual modelling of information systems. The approach consists of four stages: organizational modelling, purpose analysis, specification of system requirements and derivation of object-oriented diagrams. By following the design research methodology for performing research in information systems, the methodological approach has been designed on the basis of many existing ideas and principles in academia and industry and provides new principles, mechanisms and guidance to address the challenges presented above. / De La Vara González, JL. (2011). Business process-based requirements specification and object-oriented conceptual modelling of information systems [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/11445

在軟體開發的過程中，有效的需求管理能促成高品質的軟體及管理。在CMMI中與需求管理有關的議題包括需求發展(Requirements Development)流程領域-屬於CMMI成熟度第三級，提供一些目標、執行方法(practices)和相關資訊作為指引，協助開發團隊發展顧客需求和產品需求。另一個相關議題-需求管理(Requirements Management) 流程領域，屬於CMMI成熟度第二級，可用於幫助需求管理的規劃與控制，建立追蹤機制，以及評估改變衝擊。 本篇論文以達成CMMI中需求發展和需求管理流程領域目標為前提，利用概念形成(Concept Formulation)和系統展示(System Representation)研究方法，並調適RUP中的需求工作流程(workflow)，最後發展出一個整合的需求管理架構-稱為IREQM(Integrated Requirements Management)，用於處理需求面的問題。本研究亦根據IREQM架構進行實作，發展出一套可協助軟體需求發展與管理的支援系統。最後，我們利用自我評鑑表，評估IREQM及依據IREQM實作的雛型系統與CMMI目標和執行方法相符的程度。 / Effective requirements management can help the software development process to ensure a high-quality software development and management process. In CMMI, the process area RD (Requirements Development) provides a set of goals, practices, and related features to develop customer and product requirements, and the process area REQM (Requirements Management) is to help establishing and appraising the quality of requirements management. Both issues are covered by the generic requirement management concerns. This study is conducted by the Concept Formulation and System Representation method to develop a systematic process to deal with the requirements issues in the software development process, in order to meet the RD and REQM goals in CMMI. The study proposes an integrated requirement management framework, called IREQM, tailored from the requirements workflow in RUP. A CMMI support system, to implement IREQM is established to facilitate the REQM and RD activities during the software development process. Finally, a self-appraisal checklist is used to evaluate the compliance of the IREQM framework and its implementation to the CMMI model.