Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering

The intent of the research is to cast the prototyping method in a formal setting and to demonstrate the feasibility of such a formalization. As such, a formal basis for developing and analyzing prototyping methods and prototyping environments is formulated. Concurrently, an objective definition of prototyping is provided. To grasp the nature of prototyping, as opposed to traditional methods, conce... View full abstract»

The role of software architecture (which reflects high-level implementation constraints) in requirements engineering is clarified by providing perspectives on relevant issues, including the following: is requirements engineering merely a front end to the software development process that is concerned only with problem definition? Is software architecture an application-specific, high-level design ... View full abstract»

Requirements engineering is fraught with possibilities for misunderstanding and mistakes and it is well known that the earlier such errors occur in the lifecycle the more costly the consequences. Formal specifications provide from a developer's perspective a clear, concise and unambiguous statement of the system requirements. Prototyping enables effective user participation in the validation of re... View full abstract»

Formal descriptions, while difficult for most human readers to understand, are convenient for specifying large software systems, where completeness and consistency are important issues. Informal specifications can offer advantages in conciseness and readability, but ambiguities and contradictions are an unavoidable side-effect. Since a specification often acts as a formal contract between the soft... View full abstract»

The particular requirements engineering (RE) process modeling approach presented, advocates the capture of the history RE artifacts. An artifact is viewed as an evolutionary object which evolves as the RE process proceeds. The author proposes a classification of the various kinds of evolution of artifacts and presents a generic model, the evolutionary object model, to structure the RE history kept... View full abstract»

Supporting collaborating requirements engineers as they independently construct a specification is highly desirable. We show how collaborative requirements engineering can be supported using a planner, domain abstractions, and automated decision science techniques. In particular we show how requirements conflict resolution can be assisted through a combination of multi-agent multi-criteria optimiz... View full abstract»

The concern is with validation and evolution of software requirements based on the notion of executable specifications. A fundamental premise of this approach is that it is possible to use executable specification descriptions and conventional implementation descriptions interchangeably. This allows a prototype system to be transformed into a production quality system by incrementally replacing sp... View full abstract»

The author proposes a visual software requirements definition method including the description of a visual software requirements specification (SRS) with a visual requirements language and executing the SRS. The method proposed provides a describer for defining both the shape and semantics of icons to specify the requirements as he imagines them. The method also provides for describing icons' move... View full abstract»

Reusing domain abstractions representing key domain features has been shown to aid requirement specification, however their role in requirements engineering has not been investigated thoroughly. This paper proposes domain abstractions to aid requirements critiquing as well as specification, thus maximising the payoff from retrieving domain abstractions. The requirements critic is part of a prototy... View full abstract»

One problem in requirements transformation from informal prose requirements to formal specifications is natural language processing. Although natural language understanding is still not practical for general requirements processing, syntactical information is useful for concept extraction. This paper discusses the correspondence between requirements sentence structure patterns and the events/trans... View full abstract»

Techniques that are claimed to be applicable to analysing requirements for software intensive systems have been available for many years, but the extent to which they address this problem for large, complex systems is open to question. The techniques tend to focus on aspects of the system that are understood by specialist system designers, rather than on the issues that concern its prospective own... View full abstract»

Conceptual models are developed to assess the functional properties of information systems. Since they are used actively during the design and implementation of these systems, an important task is to make sure that the models really represent the users' needs and intentions. PPP (Phenomena, Processes, Program) is an experimental CASE environment. In the PPP environment, the conceptual modeling pro... View full abstract»

We describe a model of the requirements determination process based on four concurrent subprocesses which we term scoping, modelling, requirements and options. The main features of each of these subprocesses are described and we propose that the concept of responsibility is a boundary object which links them all. We also argue that analysing an organisation in terms of responsibilities leads to re... View full abstract»

Requirements specification methods and techniques have hitherto mainly been concerned with promoting various representation formalisms for formally describing information systems and discussing their expressive power. However, this approach concentrates only partially on the problem. A major issue is how to bridge the gap between ill-defined problem and application situations, and specification of... View full abstract»

Provides an understanding of the issues related to the transfer of requirements engineering technology from research (early state of the art) to practice (real people performing real projects). Applications include: industrial education; the university laboratory; and Rome laboratory.<<ETX>> View full abstract»

Shows how an understanding of a dynamic system from the point of view of the tasks that it supports and an understanding of human error can guide a process of deriving human error tolerance requirements. Our aim is to provide a means whereby, rather than relying on training as a means of improving operator performance, designers may develop interactive systems with human error tolerance in mind. W... View full abstract»

Requirements methods proven practical on large embedded computer systems (ECS) are formalized, synthesized, and improved. A cross-section of methods are evaluated for robust semantics, mathematical foundation, capability for analysis and verification, and support for model construction, comprehension, reuse and modification.<<ETX>> View full abstract»

Demonstrates the utility of formal methods in the development of requirements for standards. We describe the results of an exercise to generate a formal specification of the forthcoming POSIX P1003.21 standard on real-time distributed systems communications. This exercise was conducted by a relative novice in formal methods who did not have significant POSIX domain knowledge. With the assistance o... View full abstract»

Describes the first attempt to use the Z formal specification language for a deliverable Bellcore product. That first attempt involved using Z to write detailed requirements for an enhancement to an existing planning and engineering system. It is recommended that the use of formal methods at Bellcore be expanded, since the preliminary results of this trial show that existing projects can thereby o... View full abstract»

Describes a project run at St Thomas' Hospital whose goal was to design an information system that would support the business of a 'clinical directorate'. We argue that the analysis for an information system in an area as complex as this needs to be preceded by detailed domain analysis, and that conventional techniques are inadequate. The method used is described this supports the construction of ... View full abstract»

Investigates and discusses the underlying nature of the requirements traceability problem. Our work is based on empirical studies, involving over 100 practitioners, and an evaluation of current support. We introduce the distinction between pre-requirements specification (pre-RS) traceability and post-requirements specification (post-RS) traceability to demonstrate why an all-encompassing solution ... View full abstract»

In order to help solve the problems of requirements elicitation, this paper motivates and describes a new approach, based on traditional signal processing methods, for finding abstractions in natural language text. The design of AbstFinder, an implementation of the approach, and the evaluation of its effectiveness on an industrial-strength example are described.<<ETX>> View full abstract»

Current processes and support systems for software requirements determination and analysis often neglect the critical needs of important classes of stakeholders, and limit themselves to the concerns of the developers, users and customers. These stakeholders can include maintainers, interfacers, testers, product line managers, and sometimes members of the general public. This paper describes the re... View full abstract»

Rapid prototyping techniques have been recognized as an important technology for requirements engineering. By developing and exercising executable prototypes as part of the requirements specification process, it is possible to address the well known problems of ambiguity, incompleteness, and inconsistency in capturing requirements for complex software systems. The Requirements Engineering Environm... View full abstract»

As requirements engineering becomes more widespread, practitioners have learned what works and what does not work, as well as how to communicate among themselves and with other specialists, leading to standards development efforts and an increasing number of standards. This is to be welcomed, because it reflects the maturity of the technology and the realization of the importance of the specialty.... View full abstract»