Thesis (M.S.)--University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2008. / Description based on contents viewed June 2, 2008; title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references (p. 56-58).

abstract: Gathering and managing software requirements, known as Requirement Engineering (RE), is a significant and basic step during the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Any error or defect during the RE step will propagate to further steps of SDLC and resolving it will be more costly than any defect in other steps. In order to produce better quality software, the requirements have to be free of any defects. Verification and Validation (V&V;) of requirements are performed to improve their quality, by performing the V&V; process on the Software Requirement Specification (SRS) document. V&V; of the software requirements focused to a specific domain helps in improving quality. A large database of software requirements from software projects of different domains is created. Software requirements from commercial applications are focus of this project; other domains embedded, mobile, E-commerce, etc. can be the focus of future efforts. The V&V; is done to inspect the requirements and improve the quality. Inspections are done to detect defects in the requirements and three approaches for inspection of software requirements are discussed; ad-hoc techniques, checklists, and scenario-based techniques. A more systematic domain-specific technique is presented for performing V&V; of requirements. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.C.St. Computing Studies 2012

Software engineering research has been, and still is criticised as being immature and unscientific due to lack of evaluation. However, software engineering community is now focusing more on empirical research and there is a movement to adopt approaches from other mature fields like medical science and one such approach is Systematic Reviews. One of the major activities within the requirements engineering process is to use requirements prioritization that helps to focus on the most important requirements. There are many prioritization techniques available to prioritize software requirements; still there is lack of evidence of which technique to prefer. The reasons could be the differences in contexts, measurement of variables and usage of data sets. In this thesis, the area of requirements prioritization has been systematically reviewed in order to assess what evidence regarding different prioritisation techniques exist. The results from different studies are contradictory in nature due to variations in study designs, research methodologies and choice of different dependent and context variables. Based on the results of the systematic review, a research framework has been proposed to provide the researchers with a common background for further research with in requirements prioritization area. The goal of the framework is to develop reliable knowledge base as well as help researchers conduct and report prioritization studies.

Software projects are among the failure prone projects in engineering and software requirements problems have been attributed to be one of main reasons to software project failures. There are many techniques and methodology developed for practitioners to use in working with software requirements, which makes it impossible for one to master them during formal education. In addition, many of the practitioners are coming from different disciplines. Thus they are required to learn in practice. Previous studies have shown informal learning (i.e. not planned or run by institutions or organizations) to be more effective and more used in workplace learning situations. The study investigates how the requirements engineering skills are and can be learned in workplace especially informally. By comparing the results obtained by the literature study and empirical study the recommendations are given on how one can recognise, utilise, and encourage the informal learning activities to develop requirements engineering skills. The study does not rule out the need to have the formal education and training in requirements engineering but identify it as an important prerequisite and/or complement. It provides insight on how informal learning practices are utilised by practitioners who are rather experienced in requirements engineering and how they could try to recognise and/or utilise other learning opportunities presented by previous literature. It furthermore offers general recommendations of how to utilise the informal learning for developing requirements engineering skills and other related disciplines.

Numerous studies have concluded that roughly half of all implemented software requirements are never or rarely used in practice, and that failure to realise expected benefits is a major cause of software project failure. This thesis presents an exploration of these concepts, claims, and causes. It evaluates the literature s proposed solutions to them, and then presents a unified framework that covers additional concerns not previously considered. The value of a requirement is assessed often during the requirements engineering (RE) process, e.g., in requirement prioritisation, release planning, and trade-off analysis. In order to support these activities, and hence to support the decisions that lead to the aforementioned waste, this thesis proposes a framework built on the modelling languages of Goal Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE), and on the principles of Value Based Software Engineering (VBSE). The framework guides the elicitation of a requirement s value using philosophy and business theory, and aims to quantitatively model chains of instrumental value that are expected to be generated for a system s stakeholders by a proposed software capability. The framework enriches the description of the individual links comprising these chains with descriptions of probabilistic degrees of causation, non-linear dose-response and utility functions, and credibility and confidence. A software tool to support the framework s implementation is presented, employing novel features such as automated visualisation, and information retrieval and machine learning (recommendation system) techniques. These software capabilities provide more than just usability improvements to the framework. For example, they enable visual comprehension of the implications of what-if? questions, and enable re-use of previous models in order to suggest modifications to a project s requirements set, and reduce uncertainty in its value propositions. Two case studies in real-world industry contexts are presented, which explore the problem and the viability of the proposed framework for alleviating it. The thesis research questions are answered by various methods, including practitioner surveys, interviews, expert opinion, real-world examples and proofs of concept, as well as less-common methods such as natural language processing analysis of real requirements specifications (e.g., using TF-IDF to measure the proportion of software requirement traceability links that do not describe the requirement s value or problem-to-be-solved). The thesis found that in general, there is a disconnect between the state of best practice as proposed by the literature, and current industry practice in requirements engineering. The surveyed practitioners supported the notion that the aforementioned value realisation problems do exist in current practice, that they would be treatable by better requirements engineering practice, and that this thesis proposed framework would be useful and usable in projects whose complexity warrants the overhead of requirements modelling (e.g., for projects with many stakeholders, competing desires, or having high costs of deploying incorrect increments of software functionality).

Conceptual Modelling (CM) has received little attention in the area of Modelling and Simulation (M&S) and more specifically in Discrete Event Simulation (DES). It is widely agreed that CM is least understood despite its importance. This is however, not the case in other fields of science and engineering (especially, computer science, systems engineering and software engineering). In Computer Science (CS) alone, CM has been extensively used for requirements specification and some well-established methods are in practice. The aim of the thesis is to propose a CM framework based on the principles of software engineering and CS. The development of the framework is adapted from a well-known software engineering method called Structured Analysis and Design Technique (SADT), hence it is called SADT CM. It is argued that by adapting approaches from CS, similar benefits can be achieved in terms of formality, understanding, communication and quality. A comprehensive cross-disciplinary review of CM in CS and M&S is undertaken, which highlights the dearth of standards within M&S CM when compared to CS. Three important sub-fields of CS are considered for this purpose namely, information systems, databases and software engineering. The review identifies two potential methods that could be adopted for developing a M&S CM framework. The first method called PREView was found unsuitable for M&S CM in DES domain. Hence, the thesis concentrates on developing the framework based on SADT. The SADT CM framework is evaluated on three-in depth test cases that investigate the feasibility of the approach. The study also contributes to the literature by conducting a usability test of the CM framework in an experimental setting. A comprehensive user-guide has also been developed as part of the research for users to follow the framework.

Reuse has often been claimed in the software engineering literature to improve thequality and reduce the cost of software. Motivated by the idea that these gains canbe multiplied if reuse can be achieved earlier in the software life-cycle, a subset ofthe requirements engineering literature has focused, since the inception of the field,on investigating approaches to reuse at the requirements level. A wide array of differentapproaches now exist within this space. However, these approaches offer varyingdegrees of generality and utility. Generality is important because it enables a requirementsengineer to utilise the same reuse library across multiple projects. Utility isimportant because it is a measure of the extent to which effort is reduced by utilising areuse approach. This thesis presents Reuse-Oriented Requirements Engineering (RORE): a systematicframework to support the production of requirements models by reuse. RORE aimsto improve on existing requirements-reuse approaches in respect of the generalityutilitytrade-off. RORE seeks to do this by bringing together the strengths of two existingrequirements-level reuse approaches: The Domain Theory and Problem-OrientedSoftware Engineering (POSE - a refinement of Jackson’s Problem Frames Approach).This thesis evaluates RORE with respect to both generality and utility, and comparesRORE against both frameworks. The major conclusion of the thesis is that while ROREimproves on each framework in respect of some, but not all, evaluation metrics, ROREdoes succeed in offering a level of generality which compares favourably to existinghighly general approaches, and without significantly reducing the utility of the approach.

Prioritization of software requirements is an important part of the requirements engineering process within the industry of software development. There are many different methods for achieving the most optimal order of software requirements, a list that shows in what order the requirements should be implemented. This degree project utilizes the SMT-based solver Z3 for an interactive prioritization algorithm. Previous studies have shown good results with another SMT-based solver called Yices. With the newer Z3 from Microsoft, the results have been improved further, and the tool is based on Python, and the framework for Z3 is called Z3PY. Experiments have been conducted on a set of different software requirements derived from a project in the healthcare industry and show that the Z3 solution is, in general, improving the requirements prioritization compared to other mentioned solutions in the study that has been tested on the same set of requirements. Results show that the Z3 solution outperformed the other SMT-based solution Yices by 2-4% regarding disagreement and by 3% regarding average distance. The results are significantly improved based on an ANOVA test with a p-value <= 0.05.

Software development is prone to software faults due to the involvement of multiple stakeholders especially during the fuzzy phases (requirements and design). Software inspections are commonly used in industry to detect and fix problems in requirements and design artifacts, thereby mitigating the fault propagation to later phases where the same faults are harder to find and fix. The output of an inspection process is list of faults that are present in software requirements specification document (SRS). The artifact author must manually read through the reviews and differentiate between true-faults and false-positives before fixing the faults. The first goal of this research is to automate the detection of useful vs. non-useful reviews. Next, post-inspection, requirements author has to manually extract key problematic topics from useful reviews that can be mapped to individual requirements in an SRS to identify fault-prone requirements. The second goal of this research is to automate this mapping by employing Key phrase extraction (KPE) algorithms and semantic analysis (SA) approaches to identify fault-prone requirements. During fault-fixations, the author has to manually verify the requirements that could have been impacted by a fix. The third goal of my research is to assist the authors post-inspection to handle change impact analysis (CIA) during fault fixation using NL processing with semantic analysis and mining solutions from graph theory. The selection of quality inspectors during inspections is pertinent to be able to carry out post-inspection tasks accurately. The fourth goal of this research is to identify skilled inspectors using various classification and feature selection approaches. The dissertation has led to the development of automated solution that can identify useful reviews, help identify skilled inspectors, extract most prominent topics/keyphrases from fault logs; and help RE author during the fault-fixation post inspection.

Main goal of this paper is to define a solution for employee training and development programs. The goal is accomplished through formulating of project management plan and specifications of requirements and software architecture.