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2012 Second IEEE International Workshop on Model-Driven Requirements Engineering (MoDRE),
September 24, 2012,
Chicago, Illinois, USA
Second IEEE International Workshop on Model-Driven Requirements Engineering (MoDRE)
Foreword
The second edition of the Model-Driven Requirements Engineering (MoDRE) workshop continues to provide a forum where researchers and practitioners can discuss the challenges of Model-Driven Development (MDD) for Requirements Engineering (RE). Building on the success of MDD for design and implementation, RE may benefit from MDD techniques when properly balancing flexibility for capturing varied user needs with formal rigidity required for model transformations as well as high-level abstraction with information richness.
Full Papers
Operational Semantics of UML Activity Diagram: An Application in Project Management
Eugene Syriani and
Hüseyin Ergin
(University of Alabama, USA)
With its recent adoption by the International Organization for Standardization, we foresee that UML will be systematically used for object-oriented modeling in industry. UML activity diagrams have been typically used to model software and business processes. Due to its semi-formal semantics and high complexity, its advanced constructs such as expansion regions, interruptible regions, object nodes, time events, and compound activities are rarely used in practice. There has been significant work on formalizing UML activity diagrams in terms of its semantic domain: Petri net. However, none address the recent advanced constructs it offers. In this paper, we define the semantics of UML activity diagram using a rule-based model transformation. Verification and validation of the UML activity diagram model is then achieved by simulating and analyzing the Petri net model. We illustrate our technique by using an extension of UML activity diagram to facilitate project management tasks such as scheduling, cost estimation, and resource allocation.
@InProceedings{MoDRE12p1,
author = {Eugene Syriani and Hüseyin Ergin},
title = {Operational Semantics of UML Activity Diagram: An Application in Project Management},
booktitle = {Proc.\ MoDRE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {1--8},
doi = {},
year = {2012},
}
From Use Cases and Their Relationships to Code
Michał Śmiałek,
Wiktor Nowakowski,
Norbert Jarzębowski, and
Albert Ambroziewicz
(Warsaw University of Technology, Poland)
Use cases are used in many methodologies to drive the software engineering process. Though, their transition to code was usually a mostly manual process. In the context of MDD, use cases gain attention as first-class artifacts with representation notations allowing for automatic transformations to analysis and design models. The paper concentrates on an important problem of constructing transformations that cater for use case relationships. It presents a notation that unifies the ambiguous ``include'' and ``extend'', and allows for representing them within textual use case scenarios. This notation, equipped with runtime semantics, is used to construct a direct transformation into working code. The code is placed within method bodies of the Controller/Presenter and View layers within the MVC/MVP framework. Based on this transformation, an agile use-case-driven development process is possible.
@InProceedings{MoDRE12p9,
author = {Michał Śmiałek and Wiktor Nowakowski and Norbert Jarzębowski and Albert Ambroziewicz},
title = {From Use Cases and Their Relationships to Code},
booktitle = {Proc.\ MoDRE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {9--18},
doi = {},
year = {2012},
}
Narrowing the Gaps in Concern-Driven Development
Stéphane Leblanc,
Gunter Mussbacher,
Jörg Kienzle, and
Daniel Amyot
(University of Ottawa, Canada; Carleton University, Canada; McGill University, Canada)
Concern-Driven Development (CDD) promises improved productivity, reusability, and maintainability because high-level concerns that are important to stakeholders are encapsulated regardless of how these concerns are distributed over the system structure. However, to truly capitalize on the benefits promised by CDD, concerns need to be encapsulated across software development phases, i.e., across different types of models at different levels of abstraction. Model-Driven Engineering plays an important role in this context as the automated transformation of concern-oriented models (a) allows a software engineer to use the most appropriate modeling notation for a particular task, (b) automates error-prone tasks, and (c) avoids duplication of modeling effort. The earlier transformations can be applied in a CDD process, the greater the potential cost savings. Hence, we report on our experiences in applying tool supported transformations from scenario-based requirements models to structural and behavioral design models during CDD. While automated model transformations certainly contribute to the three benefits mentioned above, they can also lead to more clearly and succinctly defined modeling activities at each modeling level and aid in the precise definition of the semantics of the used modeling notations.
@InProceedings{MoDRE12p19,
author = {Stéphane Leblanc and Gunter Mussbacher and Jörg Kienzle and Daniel Amyot},
title = {Narrowing the Gaps in Concern-Driven Development},
booktitle = {Proc.\ MoDRE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {19--28},
doi = {},
year = {2012},
}
Toward Multilevel Textual Requirements Traceability Using Model-Driven Engineering and Information Retrieval
Nicolas Sannier and
Benoit Baudry
(EDF, France; INRIA, France)
In complex industrial projects, textual information remains the main vector of information at the project level. Consequently, requirements are scattered throughout multiple documents expressing different levels of requirements and different kinds of requirements. Formalizing this information and tracing different relationships among documents and organizing this environment present a challenging question.
Domain-specific modeling and traceability modeling are Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) techniques that could address various aspects of requirements formalization. Text-based high level requirements can be formalized as document concepts can be gathered and represented. Still, relationships cannot always be determined using sole MDE approaches and, as a consequence, relationships and traceability issue remains. Information retrieval (IR) approaches have already proved to work in an efficient way on large text corpora for requirements traceability analysis but do only consider similarity aspects of flatten documents, losing their organization and hierarchy.
This paper aims to introduce how a combined use of both MDE and IR can lead to improved requirements organization and traceability while handling textual ambiguous requirements documents.
@InProceedings{MoDRE12p29,
author = {Nicolas Sannier and Benoit Baudry},
title = {Toward Multilevel Textual Requirements Traceability Using Model-Driven Engineering and Information Retrieval},
booktitle = {Proc.\ MoDRE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {29--38},
doi = {},
year = {2012},
}
RSLingo: An Information Extraction Approach toward Formal Requirements Specifications
David de Almeida Ferreira and
Alberto Rodrigues da Silva
(IST, Portugal)
Requirements Engineering (RE) is about achieving a shared understanding about the software system to be built. No withstanding the importance of other RE activities, requirements specification deserves special attention due to its documentation purposes: to communicate requirements, someone has to write them down. In this paper we present RSLingo, a linguistic approach for improving the quality of requirements specifications, which is based on two languages and the mapping between them: RSL-PL, an extensible language for dealing with information extraction from requirements written in natural language; and RSL-IL, a formal language with a fixed set of constructs for representing and conveying RE-specific concerns. Contrarily to other approaches, this decoupling allows one to deal with requirements as "white-box" items, enabling a deeper understanding at a semantic level. Thus, RSLingo enables the automation of some verification tasks that prevent common requirements quality problems and lays the foundation to better integrate RE with the Model-Driven Engineering paradigm through transformations of requirements representations into design models.
@InProceedings{MoDRE12p39,
author = {David de Almeida Ferreira and Alberto Rodrigues da Silva},
title = {RSLingo: An Information Extraction Approach toward Formal Requirements Specifications},
booktitle = {Proc.\ MoDRE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {39--48},
doi = {},
year = {2012},
}
A DSL for Specifying Timing Requirements
Arda Goknil and
Marie-Agnès Peraldi-Frati
(INRIA, France)
The engineering of real-time distributed embedded systems becomes more and more complex today due to the amount of new functionalities, constraints applied on these functions and the diversity of hardware supporting software execution and communication. Modeling and analysis of time is a key issue for the correct development of these systems. From an engineering point of view, there is a need of a development process supporting modeling timing requirements at different abstraction levels. In this paper we present a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for specifying timing requirements at the analysis phase of the software development life-cycle. The DSL provides the following features: the modeling of different types of timing requirements, the modeling of symbolic timing expressions, i.e. able to deal with bounded or unset parameters in timing requirements, and the integration of complex concepts of distributed systems such as multi rate and multi clock systems.
@InProceedings{MoDRE12p49,
author = {Arda Goknil and Marie-Agnès Peraldi-Frati},
title = {A DSL for Specifying Timing Requirements},
booktitle = {Proc.\ MoDRE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {49--57},
doi = {},
year = {2012},
}
Change Impact Analysis of Indirect Goal Relations: Comparison of NFR and TROPOS Approaches Based on Industrial Case Study
Abelneh Teka,
Nelly Condori-Fernández,
Ivan Kurtev,
Dick Quartel, and
Wilco Engelsman
(University of Twente, Netherlands; BiZZdesign, Netherlands)
Along with recent trends in using goal-oriented approaches for requirements engineering and system development activities, various techniques for managing adaptable stakeholder goals and requirements are proposed and used by the software engineering industry. Enterprise Architecture (EA) models which tie business goals, business processes and supporting IT systems are also expected to support reasoning on impact of changes on goals and requirements. Unfortunately common Enterprise Architecture (EA) frameworks like The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) and EA modelling languages like Archimate lacks support for analyzing goal and requirement change impacts in EA goal models. This paper reports an effort to fill this gap by extending a metamodel of already existing requirements and goal modeling language. The extension adds semantically reach definitions for goal influence relations that support reasoning on these relations. To leverage existing change impact analysis techniques, a literature review was conducted on existing goal change management techniques. Two candidate approaches (TROPOS and NFR framework) were chosen from the review results based on comparative analysis study. However, there is no evidence suggesting which of these two approaches suits more for EA goal model analysis. To find empirical evidence on the applicability of these approaches, we develop an adapted algorithm as well as a tool support for both techniques and apply both approaches on an industrial case study. Two main lessons were learned from the result of the case study. First both approaches have some limitations when applied to EA goal analysis and second, the NFR/Fuzzy logic based approaches provide more concrete results than the TROPOS based approaches.
@InProceedings{MoDRE12p58,
author = {Abelneh Teka and Nelly Condori-Fernández and Ivan Kurtev and Dick Quartel and Wilco Engelsman},
title = {Change Impact Analysis of Indirect Goal Relations: Comparison of NFR and TROPOS Approaches Based on Industrial Case Study},
booktitle = {Proc.\ MoDRE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {58--67},
doi = {},
year = {2012},
}
Mitigating the Obsolescence of Quality Specifications Models in Service-Based Systems
Romina Torres,
Nelly Bencomo, and
Hernan Astudillo
(Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria, Chile; INRIA, France)
Requirements-aware systems address the need to reason about uncertainty at runtime to support adaptation decisions, by representing quality of services (QoS) requirements for service-based systems (SBS) with precise values in run-time queryable model specification. However, current approaches do not allow to update the specification to reflect changes in the services market, like newly available services or improved QoS of existing ones; thus, specification models reflect design-time acceptable requirements but become obsolete and miss opportunities for system improvement by self-adaptation. This articles proposes to distinguish "abstract" and "concrete" specification models: the former consist of linguistic variables (like "fast") agreed upon at design time, and the latter consist of precise numeric values (like "2[ms]") that are dynamically calculated at run-time, thus incorporating up-to-date QoS information. If and when freshly calculated concrete specifications are not satisfied anymore by the current service configuration, an adaptation is triggered. The approach was validated using four simulated SBS that use services from a previously published, real-world dataset; in all cases, the system was able to detect unsatisfied requirements at run-time and trigger suitable adaptations. Ongoing work focuses on policies to determine recalculation of specifications. This approach will allow to build SBS that can be protected against market-caused obsolescence of their requirements specifications.
@InProceedings{MoDRE12p68,
author = {Romina Torres and Nelly Bencomo and Hernan Astudillo},
title = {Mitigating the Obsolescence of Quality Specifications Models in Service-Based Systems},
booktitle = {Proc.\ MoDRE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {68--76},
doi = {},
year = {2012},
}
Impact of Footprinting on Model Quality: An Experimental Evaluation
Cédric Jeanneret,
Martin Glinz,
Benoit Baudry, and
Benoit Combemale
(University of Zurich, Switzerland; IRISA, France)
When modeling requirements, software analysts have to choose the relevant modeling constructs among all those available. If they do not choose the right set, their model may lack some important information or their model may contain many superfluous details. In previous work, we proposed to capture the purpose of a model with a set of model operations such as queries or model transformations. Then, modelers can analyze the footprints of these operations, that is, the set of model elements touched during their execution.
In this paper, we report on two controlled experiments performed with students to evaluate whether footprinting can help them in creating better models. While our studies did not demonstrate statistically significant benefits of footprinting, they reveal the importance of training and tool support for the analysis of footprints.
@InProceedings{MoDRE12p77,
author = {Cédric Jeanneret and Martin Glinz and Benoit Baudry and Benoit Combemale},
title = {Impact of Footprinting on Model Quality: An Experimental Evaluation},
booktitle = {Proc.\ MoDRE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {77--86},
doi = {},
year = {2012},
}
Short Papers
A 25 Year Retrospective on Model-Driven Requirements Engineering
Brian Berenbach
(Siemens, USA)
While many engineers are familiar with Model-Driven Design and Architecture, Model-Driven Requirements Engineering is still, for a variety of reasons, not widely accepted. Although introduced formally at the First International Workshop on Model-Driven Requirements Engineering (MDRE) in San Diego in 2001, the value proposition is still not clear, there are fewer industrial practitioners than one might expect, MDRE techniques have yet to be standardized and are still not clearly understood. This paper describes the authors experience since 1987 using MDRE techniques, including lessons learned and observed benefits and weaknesses.
@InProceedings{MoDRE12p87,
author = {Brian Berenbach},
title = {A 25 Year Retrospective on Model-Driven Requirements Engineering},
booktitle = {Proc.\ MoDRE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {87--91},
doi = {},
year = {2012},
}
An Approach on Integrating Models and Textual Specifications
Christopher L. Robinson-Mallett
(Berner&Mattner Systemtechnik, Germany)
The time-to-market pressure and the introduction of new development standards into automotive industry have created interest in systematic approaches across the whole product lifecycle. Model-based design and testing methods and tools have been successfully introduced into development processes of car manufacturers and suppliers. Surprisingly, in practice the elicitation and specification of requirements remained largely unaffected by the introduction of model-based methods, while much effort has been spent on the introduction of functional specifications. As a consequence, where functional specifications exist, these are often created unsystematically and are of poor quality, leading to further problems during design, implementation and testing. In this paper we present an approach to improve specification quality through systemization of specification structures based on architectural block diagrams, behavioural statecharts and propositional logic structures. The approach has been implemented in a tool. Experiences from the application of approach and tool in industrial projects are reported.
@InProceedings{MoDRE12p92,
author = {Christopher L. Robinson-Mallett},
title = {An Approach on Integrating Models and Textual Specifications},
booktitle = {Proc.\ MoDRE},
publisher = {IEEE},
pages = {92--96},
doi = {},
year = {2012},
}
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