RePa 2015 – Proceedings

Foreword
Getting requirements right is critical to the success of any software development project, and yet oftentimes challenging and in need of a large amount of knowledge and experience. “Patterns” have been used to capture knowledge of software engineering, concerning software architectures, component designs and programs, and recently requirements engineering. RePa 2015 aims to serve as an open forum for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas and experience on patterns of engineering processes and products related to software requirements.

Ordering Interrogative Questions for Effective Requirements Engineering: The W6H Pattern
Mujahid Sultan and Andriy Miranskyy
(Government of Ontario, Canada; Ryerson University, Canada)
Requirements elicitation and requirements analysis are important practices of Requirements Engineering. Elicitation techniques, such as interviews and questionnaires, rely on formulating interrogative questions and asking these in a proper order to maximize the accuracy of the information being gathered. Information gathered during requirements elicitation then has to be interpreted, analyzed, and validated. Requirements analysis involves analyzing the problem and solutions spaces. In this paper, we describe a method to formulate interrogative questions for effective requirements elicitation based on the lexical and semantic principles of the English language interrogatives, and propose a pattern to organize stakeholder viewpoint concerns for better requirements analysis. This helps requirements engineer thoroughly describe problem and solutions spaces. Most of the previous requirements elicitation studies included six out of the seven English language interrogatives ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘when’, ‘who’, ‘why’, and ‘how’ (denoted by W5H) and did not propose any order in the interrogatives. We show that extending the set of six interrogatives with ‘which’ (denoted by W6H) improves the generation and formulation of questions for requirements elicitation and facilitates better requirements analysis via arranging stakeholder views. We discuss the interdependencies among interrogatives (for requirements engineer to consider while eliciting the requirements) and suggest an order for the set of W6H interrogatives. The proposed W6H-based reusable pattern also aids requirements engineer in organizing viewpoint concerns of stakeholders, making this pattern an effective tool for requirements analysis.

Cataloguing Provenance-Awareness with Patterns
André Luiz de Castro Leal, José Luis Braga, and Sérgio Manuel Serra da Cruz
(Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Federal University of Viçosa, Brazil)
This paper explores the organization of provenance as a catalogue of non-functional requirement. The aim of this paper is to introduce a systematic approach to design a provenance catalogue for reuse using consolidated software engineering techniques. Provenance captures a derivation history of data products and is essential to the long-term preservation, to reuse, and to determine data quality. We propose the provenance catalogue that took into account NFR patterns and provenance taxonomies and specifications to define its softgoals. This work depicts a novel approach on provenance describing it as a Softgoal Interdependency Graph, a reusable framework that makes explicit characterization, decomposition, relationships and operationalization of elements that can be satisfied with the software. We exemplify the approach in a real usage scenario based on scientific software development.

Reusing Knowledge on Delivering Privacy and Transparency Together
Olena Zinovatna and Luiz Marcio Cysneiros
(York University, Canada)
Heavy reliance on modern technologies causes the concepts of transparency and privacy to become more and more intertwined. Some recent privacy incidents illustrates that, such as: sharing of personal health information between United States and Canadian border services agencies; enabling voice recognition software by default in Samsung’s smart TVs; accidentally collecting personal information such as emails, addresses, user IDs and passwords by Google Street View car. However, all of these incidents lack transparency in disclosing features that could trigger privacy violation; leaving the general public unaware of what, how and when their personal information or information about their behaviour is being collected and used. Developing software that addresses both qualities is a challenge. Capturing patterns of knowledge that represent alternatives to achieve Privacy requirements together with Transparency properties can help software engineers to model more comprehensive solutions. We use Softgoal Interdependencies Graphs (SIG) to capture such patterns. This paper demonstrates a set of softgoal interdependency graphs (SIG) illustrating how transparency and privacy impact each other.

Patterns of Co-evolution between Requirements and Source Code
Mona Rahimi and Jane Cleland-Huang
(DePaul University, USA)
Software systems are characterized by continual change which often occurs concurrently across various artifact types. For example, changes may be initiated at the requirements, design, or source code level. Understanding patterns of co-evolution across requirements and source code provides fundamental building blocks for automating software engineering activities such as trace link creation and evolution, requirements analysis and maintenance, refactoring detection, and the generation of task recommendations. However, prior work has focused almost entirely on the evolution of individual artifact types such as requirements, design, or source code. In this paper we document patterns of co-evolution that occur between requirements and source code. We illustrate the utility of the patterns for detecting missing requirements and for evolving requirements to source code trace links.

Building Social Sustainability into Software: Case of Equality
Maryam Al Hinai and Ruzanna Chitchyan
(University of Leicester, UK)
Equality is an important aspect in today’s diverse communities, which plays a significant role in communities’ social sus-tainability. This paper looks into modeling equality as a social sustainability dimension using a generic model of sustainability. Patterns of equality requirements are identified in this generic model. This model and respective patterns are then used in software requirements elicitation of a case study.

HAZOP-based Approach to Pattern Identification for Non-functional Requirements
Sylwia Kopczyńska and Jerzy Nawrocki
(Poznan University of Technology, Poland)
Frequently requirements are written in natural language which may cause communication problems--misunderstandings. Misunderstandings are sources of risk that can severely impact the whole software development project. Since patterns and templates are tools for improving the quality of requirements, the question arises whether they can be treated as risk guards. In the paper we propose a method based on HAZOP for pattern identification for non-functional requirements (NFRs). Our exploratory case study on cost and effectiveness of the proposed method included 125 NFRs. The analysis of the identified problems led us to propose three process patterns and provided rationale for using a three templates. Generally, the proposed method might be used to improve the existing patterns and templates as well as to develop new ones.

Using Correctness, Consistency, and Completeness Patterns for Automated Scenarios Verification
Edgar Sarmiento, Julio Cesar Sampaio do Prado Leite, and Eduardo Almentero
(PUC-Rio, Brazil; Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Scenario-based approaches are often used for Software Requirements Specification (SRS). Since scenarios are usually written in natural language, they may be ambiguous and, sometimes, inaccurate, which impair requirements quality. One of the major factors for this problem is because interactions among scenarios are seldom represented explicitly. As such, the importance of correctness, consistency and completeness, in the context of scenario-based representations should be rethought. In this paper, we employ the NFR approach to organize the non-functional requirements related to correctness, consistency and completeness as a catalog of non-functional requirements (NFR). We represent the initial catalog as non-functional requirements patterns. These initial patterns can be effectively used for automated scenario-based SRS verification. The identified patterns can be operationalized by evaluating properties related to these NFRs. We demonstrate the applicability of this catalog by instantiating it to the evaluation of an SRS based on a scenario language.