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2015 IEEE 23rd International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE),
August 24-28, 2015,
Ottawa, ON, Canada
Research Track
Change Impact Analysis for Natural Language Requirements: An NLP Approach
Chetan Arora,
Mehrdad Sabetzadeh, Arda Goknil,
Lionel C. Briand , and Frank Zimmer
(University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg; SES TechCom, Luxembourg)
Requirements are subject to frequent changes as a way to ensure that they reflect the current best understanding of a system, and to respond to factors such as new and evolving needs. Changing one requirement in a requirements specification may warrant further changes to the specification, so that the overall correctness and consistency of the specification can be maintained. A manual analysis of how a change to one requirement impacts other requirements is time-consuming and presents a challenge for large requirements specifications. We propose an approach based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) for analyzing the impact of change in Natural Language (NL) requirements. Our focus on NL requirements is motivated by the prevalent use of these requirements, particularly in industry. Our approach automatically detects and takes into account the phrasal structure of requirements statements. We argue about the importance of capturing the conditions under which change should propagate to enable more accurate change impact analysis. We propose a quantitative measure for calculating how likely a requirements statement is to be impacted by a change under given conditions. We conduct an evaluation of our approach by applying it to 14 change scenarios from two industrial case studies.
@InProceedings{RE15p6,
author = {Chetan Arora and Mehrdad Sabetzadeh and Arda Goknil and Lionel C. Briand and Frank Zimmer},
title = {Change Impact Analysis for Natural Language Requirements: An NLP Approach},
booktitle = {Proc.\ RE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {6--15},
doi = {},
year = {2015},
}
Info
Requirements Engineering: The Quest for the Dependent Variable
Hannes Holm, Teodor Sommestad, and Johan Bengtsson
(Swedish Defence Research Agency, Sweden)
Requirements engineering is a vibrant and broad research area. It covers a range of activities with different objectives. By reviewing experiments previously included in systematic literature reviews, this paper provides an overview of the dependent variables used in experimental requirements engineering research. This paper also identifies the theoretical motivation for the use of these variables in the experiments. The results show that a wide range of different variables has been applied in experiments and operationalized through both subjective assessments (e.g., subjects’ perceived utility of a technique) and objective measurements (e.g., the number of defects found in a requirements specification). The theoretical basis for these variables and operationalizations are unclear in most cases. Directions for theoretical work to identify suitable dependent variables are provided.
@InProceedings{RE15p16,
author = {Hannes Holm and Teodor Sommestad and Johan Bengtsson},
title = {Requirements Engineering: The Quest for the Dependent Variable},
booktitle = {Proc.\ RE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {16--25},
doi = {},
year = {2015},
}
Ambiguity as a Resource to Disclose Tacit Knowledge
Alessio Ferrari,
Paola Spoletini, and Stefania Gnesi
(ISTI-CNR, Italy; Kennesaw State University, USA)
Interviews are the most common and effective means to perform requirements elicitation and support knowledge transfer between a customer and a requirements analyst. Ambiguity in communication is often perceived as a major obstacle for knowledge transfer, which could lead to unclear and incomplete requirements documents. In this paper, we analyse the role of ambiguity in requirements elicitation interviews. To this end, we have performed a set of customer-analyst interviews to observe how ambiguity occurs during requirements elicitation. From this direct experience, we have observed that ambiguity is a multi-dimensional cognitive phenomenon with a dominant pragmatic facet, and we have defined a phenomenological framework to describe the different types of ambiguity in interviews. We have also discovered that, rather than an obstacle, the occurrence of an ambiguity is often a resource for discovering tacit knowledge. Starting from this observation, we have envisioned the further steps needed in the research to exploit these findings.
@InProceedings{RE15p26,
author = {Alessio Ferrari and Paola Spoletini and Stefania Gnesi},
title = {Ambiguity as a Resource to Disclose Tacit Knowledge},
booktitle = {Proc.\ RE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {26--35},
doi = {},
year = {2015},
}
An Information Theoretic Approach for Extracting and Tracing Non-functional Requirements
Anas Mahmoud
(Louisiana State University, USA)
Non-functional requirements (NFRs) are high-level quality constraints that a software system should exhibit. Detecting such constraints early in the process is critical for the stability of software architectural design. However, due to their pervasive nature, and the lack of robust modeling and documentation techniques, NFRs are often overlooked during the requirements elicitation phase. Realizing such constraints at later stages of the development process often leads to architecture erosion and poor traceability. Motivated by these observations, we propose an unsupervised, computationally efficient, and scalable approach for extracting and tracing NFRs in software systems. Based on main assumptions of the cluster hypothesis and information theory, the proposed approach exploits the semantic knowledge embedded in the textual content of requirements specifications to discover, classify, and trace high-level software quality constraints imposed by the system’s functional features. Three experimental systems are used to conduct the experimental analysis in this paper. Results show that the proposed approach can discover software NFRs with an average accuracy of 73%, enabling these NFRs to be traced to their implementations with accuracy levels adequate for practical applications.
@InProceedings{RE15p36,
author = {Anas Mahmoud},
title = {An Information Theoretic Approach for Extracting and Tracing Non-functional Requirements},
booktitle = {Proc.\ RE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {36--45},
doi = {},
year = {2015},
}
From Requirements Elicitation to Variability Analysis using Repertory Grid: A Cognitive Approach
Sangeeta Dey and
Seok-Won Lee
(Ajou University, South Korea)
The growing complexity and dynamics of the execution environment have been major motivation for designing self-adaptive systems. Although significant work can be found in the field of formalizing or modeling the requirements of adaptive system, not enough attention has been paid towards the requirements elicitation techniques for the same. It is still an open challenge to elicit the users' requirements in the light of various contexts and introduce the required flexibility in the system's behavior at an early phase of requirements engineering. We explore the idea of using a cognitive technique, repertory grid, to acquire the knowledge of various stakeholders along multiple dimensions of problem space and design space. We aim at discovering the scope of variations in the features of the system by capturing the intentional and technical variability in the problem space and design space respectively. A stepwise methodology for finding the right set of features in the changing context has also been provided in this work. We evaluate the proposed idea by a preliminary case study using smart home system domain.
@InProceedings{RE15p46,
author = {Sangeeta Dey and Seok-Won Lee},
title = {From Requirements Elicitation to Variability Analysis using Repertory Grid: A Cognitive Approach},
booktitle = {Proc.\ RE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {46--55},
doi = {},
year = {2015},
}
Goal and Preference Identification through Natural Language
Fatima Alabdulkareem, Nick Cercone, and Sotirios Liaskos
(York University, Canada)
Goal models allow efficient representation of stakeholder goals and alternative ways by which these can be satisfied. Preferences over goals in the goal model are then used to specify criteria for selecting alternatives that fit specific contexts, situations and strategies. Given such preferences, automated reasoning tools allow for efficient exploration of such alternatives. Nevertheless, to be amenable to such automated processing, goals and preferences need to be specified in a formal language, making automated processing inaccessible to the very bearers of goals and preferences, i.e., the stakeholders. We combine natural language processing techniques to allow specification of preferences through natural language statements. The natural language statement is first matched through regular expressions to distinguish between the preference component and the goal component. The former is then mapped to a preferential strength measure, while the latter is used to identify the relevant goal in the goal model through statistical semantic similarity techniques. The result constitutes a formal representation that can be used for alternatives analysis. In this way, stakeholders can access advanced goal reasoning techniques through simple natural language preference expressions, facilitating their decision making in various requirements analysis contexts. An experimental evaluation with human participants shows that the proposed system is of substantial precision and that a mapping from natural preferential verbalizations to predefined preferential strength labels is possible through sampling from crowds.
@InProceedings{RE15p56,
author = {Fatima Alabdulkareem and Nick Cercone and Sotirios Liaskos},
title = {Goal and Preference Identification through Natural Language},
booktitle = {Proc.\ RE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {56--65},
doi = {},
year = {2015},
}
Selecting Creativity Techniques for Creative Requirements: An Evaluation of Four Techniques using Creativity Workshops
Richard Berntsson Svensson and Maryam Taghavianfar
(Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden; Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden; University of Gothenburg, Sweden)
Requirements engineering is recognized as a creative process where stakeholders jointly discover new creative ideas for innovative and novel products that eventually are expressed as requirements. This paper evaluates four different creativity techniques, namely Hall of Fame, Constraint Removal, Brainstorming, and Idea Box, using creativity workshops with students and industry practitioners. In total, 34 creativity workshops were conducted with 90 students from two universities, and 86 industrial practitioners from six companies. The results from this study indicate that Brainstorming can generate by far the most ideas, while Hall of Fame generates most creative ideas. Idea Box generates the least number of ideas, and the least number of creative ideas. Finally, Hall of Fame was the technique that led to the most number of requirements that was included in future releases of the products.
@InProceedings{RE15p66,
author = {Richard Berntsson Svensson and Maryam Taghavianfar},
title = {Selecting Creativity Techniques for Creative Requirements: An Evaluation of Four Techniques using Creativity Workshops},
booktitle = {Proc.\ RE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {66--75},
doi = {},
year = {2015},
}
Feature Lifecycles as They Spread, Migrate, Remain, and Die in App Stores
Federica Sarro , Afnan Al-Subaihin,
Mark Harman , Yue Jia, William Martin, and Yuanyuan Zhang
(University College London, UK)
We introduce a theoretical characterisation of feature lifecycles in app stores, to help app developers to identify trends and to find undiscovered requirements. To illustrate and motivate app feature lifecycle analysis, we use our theory to empirically analyse the migratory and non-migratory behaviours of 4,053 non-free features from two App Stores (Samsung and BlackBerry). The results reveal that, in both stores, intransitive features (those that neither migrate nor die out) exhibit significantly different behaviours with regard to important properties, such as their price. Further correlation analysis also highlights differences between trends relating price, rating, and popularity. Our results indicate that feature lifecycle analysis can yield insights that may also help developers to understand feature behaviours and attribute relationships.
@InProceedings{RE15p76,
author = {Federica Sarro and Afnan Al-Subaihin and Mark Harman and Yue Jia and William Martin and Yuanyuan Zhang},
title = {Feature Lifecycles as They Spread, Migrate, Remain, and Die in App Stores},
booktitle = {Proc.\ RE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {76--85},
doi = {},
year = {2015},
}
Info
What You Ask Is What You Get: Understanding Architecturally Significant Functional Requirements
Preethu Rose Anish, Maya Daneva, Jane Cleland-Huang, Roel J. Wieringa, and Smita Ghaisas
(Tata Consultancy Services, India; University of Twente, Netherlands; DePaul University, USA)
Software architects are responsible for designing an architectural solution that satisfies the functional and non-functional requirements of the system to the fullest extent possible. However, the details they need to make informed architectural decisions are often missing from the requirements specification. An earlier study we conducted indicated that architects intuitively recognize architecturally significant requirements in a project, and often seek out relevant stakeholders in order to ask Probing Questions (PQs) that help them acquire the information they need. This paper presents results from a qualitative interview study aimed at identifying architecturally significant functional requirements’ categories from various business domains, exploring relevant PQs for each category, and then grouping PQs by type. Using inter-view data from 14 software architects in three countries, we identified 15 categories of architecturally significant functional requirements and 6 types of PQs. We found that the domain knowledge of the architect and her experience influence the choice of PQs significantly. A preliminary quantitative evaluation of the results against real-life software requirements specification documents indicated that software specifications in our sample largely do not contain the crucial architectural differentiators that may impact architectural choices and that PQs are a necessary mechanism to unearth them. Further, our findings provide the initial list of PQs which could be used to prompt business analysts to elicit architecturally significant functional requirements that the architects need.
@InProceedings{RE15p86,
author = {Preethu Rose Anish and Maya Daneva and Jane Cleland-Huang and Roel J. Wieringa and Smita Ghaisas},
title = {What You Ask Is What You Get: Understanding Architecturally Significant Functional Requirements},
booktitle = {Proc.\ RE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {86--95},
doi = {},
year = {2015},
}
A Requirements Monitoring Model for Systems of Systems
Michael Vierhauser
,
Rick Rabiser,
Paul Grünbacher, and Benedikt Aumayr
(JKU Linz, Austria)
Many software systems today can be characterized as systems of systems (SoS) comprising interrelated and heterogeneous systems developed by diverse teams over many years. Due to their scale, complexity, and heterogeneity engineers face significant challenges when determining the compliance of SoS with their requirements. Requirements monitoring approaches are a viable solution for checking system properties at runtime. However, existing approaches do not adequately consider the characteristics of SoS: different types of requirements exist at different levels and across different systems; requirements are maintained by different stakeholders; and systems are implemented using diverse technologies. This paper describes a three-dimensional requirements monitoring model (RMM) for SoS providing the following contributions: (i) our approach allows modeling the monitoring scopes of requirements with respect to the SoS architecture; (ii) it employs event models to abstract from different technologies and systems to be monitored; and (iii) it supports instantiating the RMM at runtime depending on the actual SoS configuration. To evaluate the feasibility of our approach we created a RMM for a real-world SoS from the automation software domain. We evaluated the model by instantiating it using an existing monitoring framework and a simulator running parts of this SoS. The results indicate that the model is sufficiently expressive to support monitoring SoS requirements of a directed SoS. It further facilitates diagnosis by discovering violations of requirements across different levels and systems in realistic monitoring scenarios.
@InProceedings{RE15p96,
author = {Michael Vierhauser and Rick Rabiser and Paul Grünbacher and Benedikt Aumayr},
title = {A Requirements Monitoring Model for Systems of Systems},
booktitle = {Proc.\ RE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {96--105},
doi = {},
year = {2015},
}
Handling Knowledge Uncertainty in Risk-Based Requirements Engineering
Antoine Cailliau and Axel van Lamsweerde
(Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium)
Requirements engineers are faced with multiple sources of uncertainty. In particular, the extent to which the identified software requirements and environment assumptions are adequate and sufficiently complete is uncertain; the extent to which they will be satisfied in the system-to-be is uncertain; and the extent to which obstacles to their satisfaction will occur is uncertain. The resolution of such domain-level uncertainty requires estimations of the likelihood that those different types of situations may or may not occur. However, the extent to which the resulting estimates are accurate is uncertain as well. This meta-level uncertainty limits current risk-based methods for requirements engineering. The paper introduces a quantitative approach for managing it. An earlier formal framework for probabilistic goals and obstacles is extended to explicitly cope with uncertainties about estimates of likelihoods of fine-grained obstacles to goal satisfaction. Such estimates are elicited from multiple sources and combined in order to reduce their uncertainty margins. The combined estimates and their uncertainties are up-propagated through obstacle refinement trees and then through the system’s goal model. Two metrics are introduced for measuring problematic uncertainties. When applied to the probability distributions obtained by up-propagation to the top-level goals, the metrics allow critical leaf obstacles with most problematic uncertainty margins to be highlighted. The proposed approach is evaluated on excerpts from a real ambulance dispatching system.
@InProceedings{RE15p106,
author = {Antoine Cailliau and Axel van Lamsweerde},
title = {Handling Knowledge Uncertainty in Risk-Based Requirements Engineering},
booktitle = {Proc.\ RE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {106--115},
doi = {},
year = {2015},
}
Bug Report, Feature Request, or Simply Praise? On Automatically Classifying App Reviews
Walid Maalej and Hadeer Nabil
(University of Hamburg, Germany)
App stores like Google Play and Apple App Store have over 3 Million apps covering nearly every kind of software and service.
Billions of users regularly download, use, and review these apps. Recent studies have shown that reviews written by the users represent a rich source of information for the app vendors and the developers, as they include information about bugs, ideas for new features, or documentation of released features.
This paper introduces several probabilistic techniques to classify app reviews into four types: bug reports, feature requests, user experiences, and ratings. For this we use review metadata such as the star rating and the tense, as well as, text classification, natural language processing, and sentiment analysis techniques.
We conducted a series of experiments to compare the accuracy of the techniques and compared them with simple string matching.
We found that metadata alone results in a poor classification accuracy. When combined with natural language processing, the classification precision got between 70-95% while the recall between 80-90%. Multiple binary classifiers outperformed single multiclass classifiers.
Our results impact the design of review analytics tools which help app vendors, developers, and users to deal with the large amount of reviews, filter critical reviews, and assign them to the appropriate stakeholders.
@InProceedings{RE15p116,
author = {Walid Maalej and Hadeer Nabil},
title = {Bug Report, Feature Request, or Simply Praise? On Automatically Classifying App Reviews},
booktitle = {Proc.\ RE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {116--125},
doi = {},
year = {2015},
}
Forging High-Quality User Stories: Towards a Discipline for Agile Requirements
Garm Lucassen,
Fabiano Dalpiaz, Jan Martijn E. M. van der Werf, and Sjaak Brinkkemper
(Utrecht University, Netherlands)
User stories are a widely used notation for formulating requirements in agile development projects. Despite their popularity in industry, little to no academic work is available on assessing their quality. The few existing approaches are too generic or employ highly qualitative metrics. We propose the Quality User Story Framework, consisting of 14 quality criteria that user story writers should strive to conform to. Additionally, we introduce the conceptual model of a user story, which we rely on to design the AQUSA software tool. AQUSA aids requirements engineers in turning raw user stories into higher-quality ones by exposing defects and deviations from good practice in user stories. We evaluate our work by applying the framework and a prototype implementation to three user story sets from industry.
@InProceedings{RE15p126,
author = {Garm Lucassen and Fabiano Dalpiaz and Jan Martijn E. M. van der Werf and Sjaak Brinkkemper},
title = {Forging High-Quality User Stories: Towards a Discipline for Agile Requirements},
booktitle = {Proc.\ RE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {126--135},
doi = {},
year = {2015},
}
Exposing the Susceptibility of Off-Nominal Behaviors in Reactive System Requirements
Daniel Aceituna and Hyunsook Do
(North Dakota State University, USA)
Requirements are typically specified on the assumption that the system's operating environment will behave in what is considered to be an expected and nominal manner. When gathering requirements, one concern is whether the requirements are too incomplete to account for every possible, unintended, off-nominal behavior (ONB) that the operating environment can create in the system. In this paper, we present a semi-automated approach, based on the causal component model (CCM), which can expose, within a set of requirements, whether ONBs can result in undesired system states. We demonstrate how the CCM approach exposes and helps address potential off-nominal behavior problems in a set of requirements that represents a real-world product. Our case study shows that the approach can expose susceptibility to ONBs and can supply information in correcting requirements.
@InProceedings{RE15p136,
author = {Daniel Aceituna and Hyunsook Do},
title = {Exposing the Susceptibility of Off-Nominal Behaviors in Reactive System Requirements},
booktitle = {Proc.\ RE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {136--145},
doi = {},
year = {2015},
}
Assessment of Risk Perception in Security Requirements Composition
Hanan Hibshi,
Travis D. Breaux, and Stephen B. Broomell
(Carnegie Mellon University, USA; King Abdul-Aziz University, Saudi Arabia)
Security requirements analysis depends on how well-trained analysts perceive security risk, understand the impact of various vulnerabilities, and mitigate threats. When systems are composed of multiple machines, configurations, and software components that interact with each other, risk perception must account for the composition of security requirements. In this paper, we report on how changes to security requirements affect analysts risk perceptions and their decisions about how to modify the requirements to reach adequate security levels. We conducted two user surveys of 174 participants wherein participants assess security levels across 64 factorial vignettes. We analyzed the survey results using multi-level modeling to test for the effect of security requirements composition on participants’ overall security adequacy ratings and on their ratings of individual requirements. We accompanied this analysis with grounded analysis of elicited requirements aimed at lowering the security risk. Our results suggest that requirements composition affects experts’ adequacy ratings on security requirements. In addition, we identified three categories of requirements modifications, called refinements, replacements and reinforcements, and we measured how these categories compare with overall perceived security risk. Finally, we discuss the future impact of our work in security requirements assessment practice.
@InProceedings{RE15p146,
author = {Hanan Hibshi and Travis D. Breaux and Stephen B. Broomell},
title = {Assessment of Risk Perception in Security Requirements Composition},
booktitle = {Proc.\ RE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {146--155},
doi = {},
year = {2015},
}
Resolving Goal Conflicts via Argumentation-Based Analysis of Competing Hypotheses
Pradeep K. Murukannaiah, Anup K. Kalia, Pankaj R. Telang, and Munindar P. Singh
(North Carolina State University, USA; Cisco Systems, USA)
A stakeholder’s beliefs influence his or her goals. However, a stakeholder's beliefs may not be consistent with the goals of all stakeholders of a system being constructed. Such belief-goal inconsistencies could manifest themselves as conflicting goals of the system to be. We propose Arg-ACH, a novel approach for capturing inconsistencies between stakeholders' goals and beliefs, and resolving goal conflicts. Arg-ACH employs a hybrid of (1) the analysis of competing hypotheses (ACH), a structured analytic technique, for systematically eliciting stakeholders' goals and beliefs, and (2) rational argumentation for determining belief-goal inconsistencies to resolve conflicts. Arg-ACH treats conflicting goals as hypotheses that compete with each other and the winning hypothesis as a goal of the system to be. Arg-ACH systematically captures the trail of a requirements engineer's thought process in resolving conflicts. We evaluated Arg-ACH via a study in which 20 subjects applied Arg-ACH or ACH to resolve goal conflicts in a sociotechnical system concerning national security. We found that Arg-ACH is superior to ACH with respect to completeness and coverage of belief search; length of belief chaining; ease of use; explicitness of the assumptions made; and repeatability of conclusions across subjects. Not surprisingly, Arg-ACH required more time than ACH: although this is justified by improvements in quality, the gap could be reduced through better tooling.
@InProceedings{RE15p156,
author = {Pradeep K. Murukannaiah and Anup K. Kalia and Pankaj R. Telang and Munindar P. Singh},
title = {Resolving Goal Conflicts via Argumentation-Based Analysis of Competing Hypotheses},
booktitle = {Proc.\ RE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {156--165},
doi = {},
year = {2015},
}
Detecting Repurposing and Over-Collection in Multi-party Privacy Requirements Specifications
Travis D. Breaux,
Daniel Smullen, and Hanan Hibshi
(Carnegie Mellon University, USA; King Abdul-Aziz University, Saudi Arabia)
Mobile and web applications increasingly leverage service-oriented architectures in which developers integrate third-party services into end user applications. This includes identity management, mapping and navigation, cloud storage, and advertising services, among others. While service reuse reduces development time, it introduces new privacy and security risks due to data repurposing and over-collection as data is shared among multiple parties who lack transparency into third-party data practices. To address this challenge, we propose new techniques based on Description Logic (DL) for modeling multi-party data flow requirements and verifying the purpose specification and collection and use limitation principles, which are prominent privacy properties found in international standards and guidelines. We evaluate our techniques in an empirical case study that examines the data practices of the Waze mobile application and three of their service providers: Facebook Login, Amazon Web Services (a cloud storage provider), and Flurry.com (a popular mobile analytics and advertising platform). The study results include detected conflicts and violations of the principles as well as two patterns for balancing privacy and data use flexibility in requirements specifications. Analysis of automation reasoning over the DL models show that reasoning over complex compositions of multi-party systems is feasible within exponential asymptotic timeframes proportional to the policy size, the number of expressed data, and orthogonal to the number of conflicts found.
@InProceedings{RE15p166,
author = {Travis D. Breaux and Daniel Smullen and Hanan Hibshi},
title = {Detecting Repurposing and Over-Collection in Multi-party Privacy Requirements Specifications},
booktitle = {Proc.\ RE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {166--175},
doi = {},
year = {2015},
}
A Quality Model for the Systematic Assessment of Requirements Traceability
Patrick Rempel and Patrick Mäder
(TU Ilmenau, Germany)
Traceability is an important quality of software requirements and allows to describe and follow their life throughout a development project. The importance of traceable requirements is reflected by the fact that requirements standards, safety regulations, and maturity models explicitly demand for it. In practice, traceability is created and maintained by humans, which make mistakes. In result, existing traces are potentially of dubious quality but serve as the foundation for high impact development decisions. We found in previous studies that practitioners miss clear guidance on how to systematically assess the quality of existing traces. In this paper, we review the elements involved in establishing traceability in a development project and derive a quality model that specifies per element the acceptable state (Traceability Gate) and unacceptable deviations (Traceability Problem) from this state. We describe and formally define how both, the acceptable states and the unacceptable deviations can be detected in order to enable practitioners to systematically assess their project's traceability. We evaluated the proposed model through an expert survey. The participating experts considered the quality model to be complete and attested that its quality criteria are of high relevance. We further found that the experts weight the occurrence of different traceability problems with different criticality. This information can be used to quantify the impact of traceability problems and to prioritize the assessment of traceability elements.
@InProceedings{RE15p176,
author = {Patrick Rempel and Patrick Mäder},
title = {A Quality Model for the Systematic Assessment of Requirements Traceability},
booktitle = {Proc.\ RE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {176--185},
doi = {},
year = {2015},
}
Sketching and Notation Creation with FlexiSketch Team: Evaluating a New Means for Collaborative Requirements Elicitation
Dustin Wüest, Norbert Seyff, and Martin Glinz
(University of Zurich, Switzerland; University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, Switzerland)
Whiteboards and paper allow for any kind of notations and are easy to use. Requirements engineers love to use them in creative requirements elicitation and design sessions. However, the resulting diagram sketches cannot be interpreted by software modeling tools. We have developed FlexiSketch as an alternative to whiteboards in previous work. It is a mobile tool for model-based sketching of free-form diagrams that allows the definition and re-use of diagramming notations on the fly. The latest version of the tool, called FlexiSketch Team, supports collaboration with multiple tablets and an electronic whiteboard, such that several users can work simultaneously on the same model sketch. In this paper we present an exploratory study about how novice and experienced engineers sketch and define ad-hoc notations collaboratively in early requirements elicitation sessions when supported by our tool. Results show that participants incrementally build notations by defining language constructs the first time they use them. Participants considered the option to re-use defined constructs to be a big motivational factor for providing type definitions. They found our approach useful for longer sketching sessions and situations where sketches are re-used later on.
@InProceedings{RE15p186,
author = {Dustin Wüest and Norbert Seyff and Martin Glinz},
title = {Sketching and Notation Creation with FlexiSketch Team: Evaluating a New Means for Collaborative Requirements Elicitation},
booktitle = {Proc.\ RE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {186--195},
doi = {},
year = {2015},
}
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