2011 IEEE 19th International Requirements Engineering Conference

This paper presents a formal specification and analysis method motivated by issues faced during early stages of requirements development for automotive features. At this early stage of development, only overall goals of features are understood, and there is a need to discover all possible scenarios of operation. We have developed a formalism - Structured Transition Systems (STS) - that facilitates... View full abstract»

This paper investigates aspects of the problem of software evolution resulting from top-level requirements change. In particular, while most research on design for software focuses on finding some correct solution, this ignores that such a solution is often only correct in a particular, and often short-lived, context. Using a logic-based goal-oriented requirements modeling language, the paper pose... View full abstract»

Although a number of requirements change classifications have been proposed in the literature, there is no empirical assessment of their practical value in terms of their capacity to inform change monitoring and management. This paper describes an investigation of the informative efficacy of a taxonomy of requirements change sources which distinguishes between changes arising from `market', `organ... View full abstract»

Communication is essential for software development as its efficiency throughout the entire project life-cycle is a key factor in developing and releasing successful software products to the market. This paper reports on findings from an explanatory case study aiming at a deeper understanding of the causes and effects of communication gaps in a large-scale industrial set up. Based on an assumption... View full abstract»

Requirements engineering involves collaboration among many project team members. Driven by coordination needs, this collaboration relies on communication and knowledge that members have of their colleagues and related activities. Ineffective coordination with those who work on requirements dependencies may result in project failure. In this paper, we report on a study of roles and communication st... View full abstract»

Roadmapping has been recognized as a critical activity for combining a business strategy with release planning. Furthermore, the marketing literature has placed increasing emphasis on the importance of understanding customers' processes and customer value. This paper presents an action research study on the roadmapping problems of two software product companies. The key findings were that customer... View full abstract»

Requirements prioritization is recognized as an important but challenging activity in software product development. For a product to be successful, it is crucial to find the right balance among competing quality requirements. Although literature offers many methods for requirements prioritization, the research on prioritization of quality requirements is limited. This study identifies how quality ... View full abstract»

Making decisions among a set of alternative system designs is an essential activity of requirements engineering. It involves evaluating how well each alternative satisfies the stakeholders' goals and selecting one alternative that achieves some optimal tradeoffs between possibly conflicting goals. Quantitative goal models support such activities by describing how alternative system designs - expre... View full abstract»

Multi-objective decisions problems are ubiquitous in requirements engineering. A common approach to solve them is to apply search-based techniques to generate a set of non-dominated solutions, formally known as the Pareto front, that characterizes all solutions for which no other solution performs better on all objectives simultaneously. Analysing the shape of the Pareto front helps decision maker... View full abstract»