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5th International Model-Driven Requirements Engineering Workshop (MoDRE 2015), August 24, 2015, Ottawa, ON, Canada

MoDRE 2015 – Proceedings

Contents - Abstracts - Authors

Frontmatter

Title Page


Foreword
Welcome to the Fifth International Workshop on Model-Driven Requirements Engineering (MoDRE) at the Requirements Engineering Conference 2015. The MoDRE workshop series has established a forum where researchers and practitioners can discuss the challenges of Model-Driven Development (MDD) for Requirements Engineering (RE).

Model Synchronization and Ontologies

Towards an Incremental Bidirectional Partial Model Synchronization between Organizational and Functional Requirements Models
Marat Abilov, Tariq Mahmoud, Jorge Marx Gómez, and Manuel Mora
(University of Oldenburg, Germany; Autonomous University of Aguascalientes, Mexico)
Model-driven software development proposes model transformations as a key system design principle. However, development of model transformations can be considered as a complex task because of the semantic difference in involved models. In particular, we are interested in the improvement of transformations between organizational and functional requirements models because the current best approaches support only forward and semi-automatic derivation of the later from the former and do not address different workflow patterns, lack of traceability and tool support, besides not taking advantage of incremental and bidirectional approaches. Model synchronization techniques are proposed to address these challenges. In this paper, we present an analysis of the main model synchronization engines reported in the literature as well as their tool-support based on a defined set of problem-specific requirements. We present also an approach to achieve these requirements by defining a general mapping scheme and model synchronization rules to be used in the context of software development process. Initial results and further research steps on it are finally reported.

Using i* Model towards Ontology Integration and Completeness Checking in Enterprise Systems Requirement Hierarchy
Novarun Deb, Nabendu Chaki, and Aditya Ghose
(University of Calcutta, India; University of Wollongong, Australia)
i* is a goal oriented requirements engineering tool that can model varied requirements for solutions being developed by an enterprise. Different stakeholders within an enterprise may use partial or even completely non-intersecting vocabulary sets. This would lead to developing multiple i* models having independent ontologies. Collectively, these i* models define a requirements refinement hierarchy where different tiers of the hierarchy capture different levels of detail. In order to integrate such a distributed ontology, we require an appropriate mapping or correlate definitions between different ontologies at multiple levels. This paper tries to identify different types of bridging correlations that allow an integration of multi-ontological i* refinement hierarchies. We use these correlations to demonstrate how relative completeness can be established between adjacent tiers of the hierarchy. Varying degrees of relative completeness have also been identified and their fulfillment criteria have been summarized as theorems. A University Admissions System has been used as a case study to illustrate heuristics for achieving greater relative completeness.

An Ontology-Based Requirement Modeling for Interactive Software Customization
Xiaobu Yuan and Xieshen Zhang
(University of Windsor, Canada)
The advancements in software product lines have initiated a shift of focus from the development of individual to lines of software products. Meanwhile, research in service ontology and service-oriented architecture is producing the much-needed technologies to link functional context of services with requirement features, and to automate the discovery and composition of services. This paper presents a novel approach of interactive requirements elicitation for the production of customized software systems. It first develops an ontology model to represent the knowledge of common and variable software assets, and then suggests a nine-step process to create instances of the ontology model as abstract requirement models for specific application domains. Moreover, an algorithm is developed to enable software clients to interactively ``order'' service-oriented software products by means of dialogue in natural language. In addition to technical details, this paper also includes a case study of an online book shopping system to demonstrate the operation of the proposed approach and to provide evidence of its usability.

Combining Ontologies for Requirements Elicitation
Shubhrendu Tripathi and Xiaobu Yuan
(University of Windsor, Canada)
A variety of ontologies are used to define and represent knowledge in many domains. Many ontological approaches have been successfully applied in the field of Requirements Engineering. In order to successfully harness the disparate ontologies, researchers have focused on various ontology merging techniques. However, no serious attempts have been made in the area of Requirments Elicitation where ontology merging has the potential to be quite effective in generating requirements specifications quickly through the means of reasoning based on combined ontologies. This paper attempts to define an approach needed to effectively combine ontologies to enhance the Requirements Elicitation process. A methodology is proposed whereby domain knowledge encapsulated in existing ontologies is combined with an ontology being developed to capture the requirements. Using this, requirements engineers would be able to create more refined Requirements Deliverables.

Variability and Goal Modeling

Model-Based Systems Engineering with Requirements Variability for Embedded Real-Time Systems
Mole Li and Peter Bull
(Loughborough University, UK; Rolls-Royce, UK; Birmingham City University, UK)
Product Line Engineering (PLE) offers the benefits of reducing costs and time to market by reusing requirements and components. Current PLE methods, however, mainly focus on the software aspects and are lacking in support for many system level concerns like physical and non-functional requirements (Quality of Service attributes) that play an important role in the development of Embedded Real-Time Systems (RTS). This paper proposes a new method to support a combination of variability modelling (a key feature of PLE) and model-based requirement engineering (in SysML) for Embedded RTS. It provides four main contributions: 1. it extends the Orthogonal Variability Model (OVM) to support the separation of functional, physical and non-functional variability; 2. it proposes a mechanism for the evolution of variability; 3. stakeholders’ specifications for variable requirements are extended by the proposed approach; 4. it increases the consistency of system models by directly using SysML Activity Diagrams and Block Definition Diagrams as a base model for refining variability models for requirement representation. The proposed method is illustrated by an Aircraft Engine Control System case study.

The Synergies between Goal Sketching and Enterprise Architecture
Kenneth Boness and Rachel Harrison
(University of Reading, UK; Oxford Brookes University, UK)
This paper introduces a pragmatic and practical method for requirements modeling. The method is built using the concepts of our goal sketching technique together with techniques from an enterprise architecture modeling language. Our claim is that our method will help project managers who want to establish early control of their projects and will also give managers confidence in the scope of their project. In particular we propose the inclusion of assumptions as first class entities in the ArchiMate enterprise architecture modeling language and an extension of the ArchiMate Motivation Model principle to allow radical as well as normative analyses. We demonstrate the usefulness of this method using a simple university library system as an example.

Evaluation of Reusable Concern-Oriented Goal Models
Mustafa Berk Duran, Aldo Navea Pina, and Gunter Mussbacher
(McGill University, Canada)
A new unit of encapsulation called the concern is at the center of Concern-Orientation. Building on techniques for advanced Separation of Concerns, from Model-Driven Engineering, and from Software Product Lines, Concern-Orientation is a reuse paradigm that stipulates the use of three interfaces to enable broad, generic reuse: the variation, customization, and usage interfaces. Higher-level concerns reuse lower-level concerns, resulting in concern hierarchies where lower-level concern models are composed with higher-level concern models. As part of the variation interface, goal models are used to describe the impact of features of a concern on system qualities. Consequently, goal models of lower-level concerns must be combined with goal models of higher-level concerns to enable reasoning about system qualities in concern hierarchies. However, existing propagation-based reasoning mechanisms for goal models still assume a monolithic goal model, which is not appropriate for concern-oriented reuse. To address this issue, this paper presents novel modeling constructs to enable the reuse of lower-level goal models in the context of Concern-Orientation, extends existing propagation-based reasoning mechanisms of goal models for use in concern hierarchies, and reports on a proof-of-concept implementation of the novel modeling constructs and the extended reasoning mechanism.

Goal Model Driven Alternative Selection: A Quantitative Approach
Tianqi Zhao, Haiyan Zhao, Wei Zhang, and Zhi Jin
(Peking University, China)
Model driven engineering (MDE) techniques can be used in requirement engineering to derive an implementation out of system requirements, which could be extended to derive models in the solution space out of models in the problem space. Goal models are useful to deal with problem space modeling and support requirements analysis activities including alternative selection, a procedure that is performed to evaluate the feasibility and desirability of alternative strategies with respect to quality goals. The results of alternative requirements selection can be referred to derive the configuration of solution space models and accordingly the implementation of software, since requirements elements can be traced to architecture elements or architecture design issues. Most of the existing goal-oriented requirement engineering (GORE) frameworks conduct alternative selection based on qualitative goal models, which are too coarse-grained to differentiate alternatives. Several works offer quantitative analysis based on quantified goal models, but they did not provide guided methods to obtain the numbers in these models. In this paper, we extend general goal models by appending quantitative attributes and a modified AHP-based approach to the quantification of goal-related links. Based on this quantitative goal model, an algorithm is proposed to guide the procedure of goal violation detection and multi-criteria alternative selection. We have evaluated the proposed approach by comparing it with six related approaches, with the conclusion that our method makes improvements to support multi-criteria selection of requirements and design alternatives.

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