A UML reuse framework and tool for Requirements Engineering

International Journal of Modern Education and Computer Science

Requirement elicitation and analysis form the focal point in the initial stages of the software development process. Unfortunately, in many software development projects, developers and end-users speak different languages. On one hand, end-users prefer to use natural languages while software developers who are technically perceptive, tend to use conceptual models. This difference in technical knowledge creates a communication gap, a potential cause of poor quality software products or project conflicts. The aim of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of a novel technique that seeks to foster effective elicitation of software requirements and support the implementation of structures that match particular requirements. By combining requirement elicitation and re-usable parts, the proposed solution envisages improvements in the overall software design process leading to enhanced requirement specifications. The novel idea is to incorporate an intermediate step for mapping Unified Modeling Language (UML) to Web Ontology Language (OWL) to enable the addition of ontology languages. The proposed model is validated through a survey. The validation results show that the proposed solution allows software developers to elicit software requirements and implement structures that match certain requirements.

2010

Preface Domain Engineering, also referred to as product line engineering, deals with developing reusable assets that can be adjusted and adapted to families of applications, rather than to particular systems. A domain in this context can be defined as an area of knowledge that uses common concepts for describing phenomena, requirements, problems, capabilities, and solutions. The purpose of domain engineering is to identify, model, construct, catalog, and disseminate artifacts that represent the commonalities and differences within a domain, as well as to provide mechanisms, techniques, and tools to reuse these artifacts in the development of particular applications and systems. Although being applicable to different engineering disciplines, domain engineering methods and domain specific languages (DSL) receive nowadays special attention from the information systems and software engineering communities who deal with artifact reuse, application validation, and domain knowledge represe...

1999

In many organizations, there has been a move toward the use of object-oriented methods for the development of information systems. Little is understood, or reported on the basis of research, of the use of object-oriented methods by practicing professionals in the production of requirements specifications for commercial or industrial sized projects. In this paper, we outline a conceptual framework of "what might be happening" in professional object-oriented requirements engineering based on the common characteristics of published, well known object-oriented methods. We then describe a research project and the findings from a set of six case studies that have been undertaken that examine professional practice from the standpoint of the epistemology contained in the conceptual model. In these studies, it was found that the more formal models of objectorientation were rarely used to validate, or even clarify, the specification with clients or users. Rather, analysts tended to use informal models, such as use cases or ad hoc diagrams, to communicate the specification to users. Formal models are more often used internally within the analysis team and for communicating the specification to the design team.

Citeseer

The tutorial addresses the problems connected with requirements modelling in a UML-based development process. UML supports requirements modelling by means of use cases. This practice suffers from several limitations, especially as use cases are quite informal descriptions ...

Jurnal RESTI (Rekayasa Sistem dan Teknologi Informasi)

Requirements engineering (RE) is an initial activity in the software engineering process that involves many users. The involvement of various users in the RE process raises ambiguity and vagueness in requirements modeling. In addition, traditional RE is a time-consuming activity. Therefore various studies have been conducted to support process automation on RE. This paper conducts a systematic literature review (SLR) to obtain information about RE automation related to RE activities, methods/models, tools, and domains. SLR is done through 5 main stages: definition of research questions, conducting the search, screening for relevant papers, data extraction, mapping, and analysis. The data extraction and mapping are carried out on 155 relevant publications from 2016 to 2022. Based on the results from SLR, around 53% of the research focuses on RE automation in analysis and specifications, 40% focuses on elicitation, validation, and requirements management, and 7% focuses on requirement...

Journal of Software: Evolution and Process

Nowadays, the demand for higher quality in software products causes the increased complexity of these products. These two aspects (quality and complexity) combined with productivity are key elements for improving the competitiveness between software companies and differentiating success from failure in the software industry. In this sense, software reuse, and requirements reuse in particular, has been widely recognized as an effective way to improve software quality and productivity. In this paper we propose a model to reuse the software requirements in a Requirements Catalog. This research aims to define the guidelines to carry out the requirements reuse process through four principal activities: searching, selecting, adapting, and implementing. Also, the commercial tool Computer-Aided Requirements Engineering (CARE) Rational RequisitePro was tailored to make feasible the implementation of the proposed model; in this sense, a tool plug-in was developed. Finally, a case study is pre...

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1993

Reuse, system integration, and interoperability create a growing need for capturing, representing, and using application-level information about software-intensive systems and their evolution. In ESPRIT Basic Research Project NATURE, we are developing an integrative approach to requirements management based on a threedimensional framework which addresses formalism as well as cognitive and social aspects. This leads to a new requirements process model which integrates human freedoms through allowing relatively free decisions in given situations. Classes of situations and decisions are defined with respect to the three-dimensional framework through the integration of informal and formal representations, theories of domain modeling, and the explicit consideration of nonfunctional requirements in teamwork. Technical support is provided by a conceptual modeling environment with knowledge acquisition through interactive as well as reverse modeling, and with similarity-based querying.

2019

Traditionally, requirements engineering has been stakeholder driven. With the advent of digital technologies, unprecedented amounts of data are continuously generated. Although such dynamic data are not created with the intention of eliciting requirements, they may include information about system requirements, including up-to-date user requirements, which would be difficult to obtain with traditional elicitation methods. Thus, in addition to domain knowledge, dynamic data from unintended digital sources can potentially serve as valuable requirements sources and support automated and continuous requirements engineering. However, most previous efforts to automate the requirements engineering process have focused on eliciting requirements from domain knowledge that are relatively static, or partially supporting automation of specific requirements engineering activities. There is, thus, a lack of a holistic framework to automate the requirements engineering process that is driven by dynamic data from unintended digital sources. To address this research gap, the PhD study aims at developing a novel and holistic framework for automating data-driven requirements engineering. A design science approach will be used to develop the envisaged framework. This paper reports on the research progress based on the first six months of the PhD study, which includes explicating research problems, formulating research questions, and presenting an initial overview of the envisaged framework as well as preliminary results of a systematic review on the state-ofthe-art automated methods for eliciting requirements from dynamic data. The framework will support efficient and effective inclusion of important and relevant requirements for improving existing or developing new software systems.

Analogy is proposed as an alternative paradigm for specijkation reuse during requirements analysis. However, extensive analyst involvement is necessary to maximise analogical reuse across domains. An intelligent reuse advisor which supports analysts during the retrieval, understanding and customisation of complex specijkations is proposed. Its design is based on cognitive models of analogical reasoning during software reuse derived from empirical studies of analytic behaviour.