No Arabic abstract
In their seminal paper in the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, Zave and Jackson established a core ontology for Requirements Engineering (RE) and used it to formulate the requirements problem, thereby defining what it means to successfully complete RE. Given that stakeholders of the system-to-be communicate the information needed to perform RE, we show that Zave and Jacksons ontology is incomplete. It does not cover all types of basic concerns that the stakeholders communicate. These include beliefs, desires, intentions, and attitudes. In response, we propose a core ontology that covers these concerns and is grounded in sound conceptual foundations resting on a foundational ontology. The new core ontology for RE leads to a new formulation of the requirements problem that extends Zave and Jacksons formulation. We thereby establish new standards for what minimum information should be represented in RE languages and new criteria for determining whether RE has been successfully completed.
The design of software systems inevitably enacts normative boundaries around the site of intervention. These boundaries are, in part, a reflection of the values, ethics, power, and politics of the situation and the process of design itself. This paper argues that Requirements Engineering (RE) require more robust frameworks and techniques to navigate the values implicit in systems design work. To this end, we present the findings from a case of action research where we employed Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH), a framework from Critical Systems Thinking (CST) during requirements gathering for Homesound, a system to safeguard elderly people living alone while protecting their autonomy. We use categories from CSH to inform expert interviews and reflection, showing how CSH can be simply combined with RE techniques (such as the Volere template) to explore and reveal the value-judgements underlying requirements.
Model-based systems engineering (MBSE) provides an important capability for managing the complexities of system development. MBSE empowers the formalisms of system architectures for supporting model-based requirement elicitation, specification, design, development, testing, fielding, etc. However, the modeling languages and techniques are quite heterogeneous, even within the same enterprise system, which creates difficulties for data interoperability. The discrepancies among data structures and language syntaxes make information exchange among MBSE models even more difficult, resulting in considerable information deviations when connecting data flows across the enterprise. For this reason, this paper presents an ontology based upon graphs, objects, points, properties, roles, and relationships with entensions (GOPPRRE), providing meta models that support the various lifecycle stages of MBSE formalisms. In particular, knowledge-graph models are developed to support unified model representations to further implement ontological data integration based on GOPPRRE throughout the entire lifecycle. The applicability of the MBSE formalism is verified using quantitative and qualitative approaches. Moreover, the GOPPRRE ontologies are generated from the MBSE language formalisms in a domain-specific modeling tool, textit{MetaGraph} in order to evaluate its availiablity. The results demonstrate that the proposed ontology supports both formal structures and the descriptive logic of the systems engineering lifecycle.
In this work we present an account of the status of requirements engineering in the gaming industry. Recent papers in the area were surveyed. Characterizations of the gaming industry were deliberated upon by portraying its relations with the market industry. Some research directions in the area of requirements engineering in the gaming industry were also mentioned.
[Context & motivation] Driven by the need for faster time-to-market and reduced development lead-time, large-scale systems engineering companies are adopting agile methods in their organizations. This agile transformation is challenging and it is common that adoption starts bottom-up with agile software teams within the context of traditional company structures. [Question/Problem] This creates the challenge of agile teams working within a document-centric and plan-driven (or waterfall) environment. While it may be desirable to take the best of both worlds, it is not clear how that can be achieved especially with respect to managing requirements in large-scale systems. [Principal ideas/Results] This paper presents an exploratory case study at an automotive company, focusing on two departments of a large-scale systems company that is in the process of company-wide agile adoption. [Contribution] We present challenges related to requirements engineering that agile teams face while working within a larger plan-driven context and propose potential strategies to mitigate the challenges. Challenges relate to, e.g., development teams not being aware of the high-level requirement and dealing with flexibility of writing user stories. We found that strategies for overcoming most of these challenges are still lacking and thus call for more research.
Small to medium sized business enterprises (SMEs) generally thrive because they have successfully done something unique within a niche market. For this reason, SMEs may seek to protect their competitive advantage by avoiding any standardization encouraged by the use of packaged software (PS). Packaged software implementation at SMEs therefore presents challenges relating to how best to respond to misfits between the functionality offered by the packaged software and each SMEs business needs. An important question relates to which processes small software enterprises - or Small to Medium-Sized Software Development Companies (SMSSDCs) - apply in order to identify and then deal with these misfits. To explore the processes of packaged software (PS) implementation, an ethnographic study was conducted to gain in-depth insights into the roles played by analysts in two SMSSDCs. The purpose of the study was to understand PS implementation in terms of requirements engineering (or PSIRE). Data collected during the ethnographic study were analyzed using an inductive approach. Based on our analysis of the cases we constructed a theoretical model explaining the requirements engineering process for PS implementation, and named it the PSIRE Parallel Star Model. The Parallel Star Model shows that during PSIRE, more than one RE process can be carried out at the same time. The Parallel Star Model has few constraints, because not only can processes be carried out in parallel, but they do not always have to be followed in a particular order. This paper therefore offers a novel investigation and explanation of RE practices for packaged software implementation, approaching the phenomenon from the viewpoint of the analysts, and offers the first extensive study of packaged software implementation RE (PSIRE) in SMSSDCs.