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2014 IEEE 4th International Workshop on Requirements Patterns (RePa), August 26, 2014, Karlskrona, Sweden

RePa 2014 – Proceedings

Contents - Abstracts - Authors

2014 IEEE 4th International Workshop on Requirements Patterns (RePa)

Frontmatter

Title Page


Preface
Getting requirements right is 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 more recently requirements engineering. The International Workshop on Requirements Patterns (RePa) workshop series was motivated by the desire to provide an open forum for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas and experience, to develop pattern-based approaches to capturing, organizing, and reusing of all aspects of requirements engineering-related knowledge, from both process and product perspectives. Building on the success of the previous three editions of the International Workshop on Requirements Patterns (RePa'11, RePa'12 and RePa'13), the overall aim of RePa'14 is to promote and support the development and sharing of patterns, tools, methods, and repositories to facilitate pattern-based reuse at the requirements level.

Natural Language and Semantic Patterns

Requirement Boilerplates: Transition from Manually-Enforced to Automatically-Verifiable Natural Language Patterns
Chetan Arora, Mehrdad Sabetzadeh, Lionel C. Briand, and Frank Zimmer
(University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg; SES TechCom, Luxembourg)
By enforcing predefined linguistic patterns on requirements statements, boilerplates serve as an effective tool for mitigating ambiguities and making Natural Language requirements more amenable to automation. For a boilerplate to be effective, one needs to check whether the boilerplate has been properly applied. This should preferably be done automatically, as manual checking of conformance to a boilerplate can be laborious and error prone. In this paper, we present insights into building an automatic solution for checking conformance to requirement boilerplates using Natural Language Processing (NLP). We present a generalizable method for casting requirement boilerplates into automated NLP pattern matchers and reflect on our practical experience implementing automated checkers for two well-known boilerplates in the RE community. We further highlight the use of NLP for identification of several problematic syntactic constructs in requirements which can lead to ambiguities.

Semantic Annotation of a Formal Grammar by SemanticPatterns
Mathias Schraps and Maximilian Peters
(Audi Electronics Venture, Germany; Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany)
The elicitation and formalization of natural language requirements are still a challenge of Requirements Engineering. The characteristics of such requirements are manifold: they need to be understandable to each of the stakeholders and they should be processable by computers, for example, to analyze or to trace requirements across many steps during the system development process. For this purpose, a controlled natural language (CNL) can be used to specify textual requirements. Thus, it is possible to define the allowed syntax of requirements, but this does not consider the semantic content. With semantic annotations of a formal grammar (so-called SemanticPatterns), it is possible to capture the semantic dependencies within textual requirements and to transform them into an ontology, and this ontology is used to check the consistency of whole requirement specifications and also between the specification and other design artifacts. This paper presents an approach using a formal grammar with semantic annotations to formalize textual requirements and to make it processable by computers. The formulation and consistency check of several automotive requirements are shown based on the prototypical tool GO-Editor.

Patterns for Requirements Modeling

A Feature Modeling Approach for Domain-Specific Requirement Elicitation
Olga De Troyer and Erik Janssens
(Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)
In this paper, we presented an approach for domain-specific requirement elicitation. Building domain-specific software requires the expertise of people with very different background and with different levels of experience in software development. This complicates the process of requirement elicitation. The purpose of the approach is twofold. On the one hand, we want to unlock available information on requirement elicitation for particular domains. On the other hand, we want to provide a mechanism for guiding the stakeholders (non-computing as well as computing people) through the requirement elicitation process in these domains. The approach is based on Feature Modeling, a variability modeling technique used in Software Product Lines. Furthermore, a tablet app has been developed to support the approach. We demonstrate the approach for two different domains, the domain of serious games for children and the domain of e-shop web applications. A first evaluation of the approach and the tool has been done by means of two explorative case studies and resulted in positive feedbacks.

Reusing Non-functional Patterns in i* Modeling
Herbet Cunha and Julio Cesar Sampaio do Prado Leite
(PUC-Rio, Brazil)
Patterns are an important concept for capturing and reusing Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) knowledge. This paper reports on the use of NFR patterns as a means for reusing cataloged information. In particular we stress its use for intentional models written in i*. This paper focuses on the NFR awareness and details some of its patterns. The integration with i* is done by means of specification patterns, which integrates the cataloged information with the i* model. An example is shown as to argue about the feasibility of our proposal.

Requirements Engineering Patterns for the Modeling of Online Social Networks Features
Sarah Bouraga, Ivan Jureta, and Stéphane Faulkner
(University of Namur, Belgium)
This paper proposes requirements patterns for Online Social Networks (OSNs). Patterns are based on features observed on currently popular OSNs, and are defined as i-star models. Patterns are relevant for the requirements engineering of new OSNs. They can help in requirements elicitation, in order to avoid missing important OSN requirements. They can be used as basic models of OSN requirements, something that a modeler starts from, and then specializes and changes according to the specific requirements from OSN stakeholders.

Privacy and Security Patterns

Privacy Requirements Patterns for Mobile Operating Systems
Xiao Xuan, Ye Wang, and Shanping Li
(Zhejiang University, China; Zhejiang Gongshang University, China)
Nowadays mobile devices have rapidly developed. Privacy protection for mobile operating systems has become a hot topic in industry and research, which also brings new challenges. The scenarios in mobile operating systems are different from those in tradition systems. Users of mobile systems face more and more new risks in new scenarios. On the other hand, personal data is growing exponentially every day. It reminds us the importance of privacy protection is also increasing at the same time.
In this paper, we study the privacy patterns for mobile operating systems. We elicit privacy-related requirements in three ways - knowledge from domain experts, literature review on public documents of existing mature systems and feedback from real users. Based on these requirements, we propose 7 privacy patterns which are presented with the RePa Requirements Pattern Template. All of these patterns were refined by professional business analysts which concrete the result of our work. We believe that our findings can help business analysts with the description for privacy requirements in future mobile operating system development projects.

Threat and Countermeasure Patterns for Cloud Computing
Takao Okubo, Yoshiro Wataguchi, and Nobuyuki Kanaya
(Institute of Information Security, Japan; Fujitsu Labs, Japan)
Recently cloud computing markets have expanded, and there are various kind of services and their providers. However, Security is the primary concern of cloud users. However, service providers are unaware precisely of the types of security countermeasures required for their cloud servers. A method to define what the type security required for each operator using two security patterns are proposed. One is for typical threats and the other is for typical countermeasures. Using the two patterns with the relationship information among the functions, cloud components and stakeholders, the security coverage of the cloud and the security duties of each operator become clear.

Case Study

Using Non-functional Requirements Templates for Elicitation: A Case Study
Sylwia Kopczyńska and Jerzy Nawrocki
(Poznan University of Technology, Poland)
It is still an open question how to achieve a proper balance between the cost and value of requirements elicitation. When deciding to assign time and other resources to elicitation, one needs to know what its effectives would be. In the paper we investigate the Structured Elicitation of Non-functional Requirements(SENoR) method. The method is composed of a sequence of short brainstorming sessions driven by ISO25010 quality characteristics. It uses Non-functional Requirements Templates (NoRTs) to support the elicitation process. Our exploratory case study on cost and effectiveness of SENoR and NoRTs included 7 projects that developed tailor-made web applications. The findings show that two 1.5-hour elicitation workshops can result in non-functional requirements of stability at the level of 80%.

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