Requirement analysis

This paper describes a natural language-based tool which aims at supporting the Analysis stage of software development in an Object-Oriented framework. This Natural Language Processing technique is to analyze software requirement texts written in English and build an integrated discourse model of the processed text, represented in a Semantic Network. This Semantic Network is then used to automatically construct an UML diagrams such as Class Model representing the object classes mentioned in the text and the relationships anions them & sequence diagram of the dynamic model. Requirement analysis determines the user expectation for the application. We propose a method to extract the diagrams from requirement analysis with strong semantic support. The tool can also convert the user modelling information into the blocks of programming source code; Code generation is made available in Java. The aim is to demonstrate the use of NLP (Natural Language Processing) techniques for the extraction of UML diagrams with code template generation in JAVA by implementing a prototype tool that uses the NLP techniques.

Resumo - Este artigo apresenta um estudo comparativo acerca da Análise de Requisitos de sistemas embarcado no segmento da Telemedicina. O caráter multidisciplinar deste trabalho fundamenta-se na Medicina e nas Engenharias de Design e de Software. A metodologia usada baseou-se nas técnicas de Análise de Requisitos da Engenharia de Desing e Software, levando em consideração as restrições funcionais de recentes tecnologias computacionais. O Método Volere apresentou-se mais abrangente para conduzir ao entendimento do domínio estudado. Palavras-chave: Software Embarcado, Telemedicina, Requisitos, Método Volere. Abstract - This paper shows a study of the Requirements Analysis for embedded software support in the Telemedicine area. This multidisciplinary work is founded on Medicine, Software and Design Engineering. The methodology used was based on Software and Design Engineering's Requirements Analysis, taking into account constraints of recent computational technologies. The Volere ...

— To design a secure software system, a security designer needs a workbench so that security of the system can be embedded into the system from the very early stages of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Among the proposed approaches to elicit security ...

Recent advances in mechanical techniques for systematic testing have increased our ability to automatically find subtle bugs, and hence, to deploy more dependable software. This paper builds on one such systematic technique, scope-bounded testing, to develop a novel specification-based approach for efficiently generating tests for products in a software product line. Given properties of features as first-order logic formulas in Alloy, our approach uses SAT-based analysis to automatically generate test inputs for each product in a product line. To ensure soundness of generation, we introduce an automatic technique for mapping a formula that specifies a feature into a transformation that defines incremental refinement of test suites. Our experimental results using different data structure product lines show that an incremental approach can provide an order of magnitude speedup over conventional techniques. We also present a further optimization using dedicated integer constraint solvers for feature properties that introduce integer constraints, and show how to use a combination of solvers in tandem for solving Alloy formulas.

Problems which originate in early development stages can have a lasting influence on the reliability, safety, and cost of a software system. The requirements document, which is usually available at the requirements analysis stage, must be correct, unambiguous, and complete if the rest of the development effort is to succeed. The ability to identify faults in requirements and predict the reliability of a software system early in its development can help organizations make informative decisions about corrective actions and improve the system's quality in a cost-effective manner. A review of the literature reveals that existing approaches are unsuited to provide trustworthy reliability prediction either due to the ignorance of the requirements documents, or because of the informal and fairly sketchy way in detecting faults in requirements.

Problems which originate in early development stages can have a lasting influence on the reliability, safety, and cost of a software system. The requirements document, which is usually available at the requirements analysis stage, must be correct, unambiguous, and complete if the rest of the development effort is to succeed. The ability to identify faults in requirements and predict the reliability of a software system early in its development can help organizations make informative decisions about corrective actions and improve the system's quality in a cost-effective manner. A review of the literature reveals that existing approaches are unsuited to provide trustworthy reliability prediction either due to the ignorance of the requirements documents, or because of the informal and fairly sketchy way in detecting faults in requirements. This study explores the use of a preselected software reliability measurement for early software faults detection and reliability prediction. T...

In market-driven software development there is a strong need for support to handle congestion in the requirements engineering process, which may occur as the demand for short time-to-market is combined with a rapid arrival of new requirements from many different sources. Automated analysis of the continuous flow of incoming requirements provides an opportunity to increase the efficiency of the requirements engineering process. This paper presents empirical evaluations of the benefit of automated similarity analysis of textual requirements, where existing information retrieval techniques are used to statistically measure requirements similarity. The results show that automated analysis of similarity among textual requirements is a promising technique that may provide effective support in identifying relationships between requirements.

In market-driven software development there is a strong need for support to handle congestion in the requirements engineering process, which may occur as the demand for short time-to-market is combined with a rapid arrival of new requirements from many different sources. Automated analysis of the continuous flow of incoming requirements provides an opportunity to increase the efficiency of the requirements engineering process. This paper presents empirical evaluations of the benefit of automated similarity analysis of textual requirements, where existing information retrieval techniques are used to statistically measure requirements similarity. The results show that automated analysis of similarity among textual requirements is a promising technique that may provide effective support in identifying relationships between requirements.

SBSE techniques have been widely applied to requirements selection and prioritization problems in order to ascertain a suitable set of requirements for the next release of a system. Unfortunately, it has been widely observed that requirements tend to be changed as the development process proceeds and what is suitable for today, may not serve well into the future. Though SBSE has been widely applied to requirements analysis, there has been no previous work that seeks to balance the requirements needs of today with those of the future. This paper addresses this problem. It introduces a multi-objective formulation of the problem which is implemented using multi-objective Pareto optimal evolutionary algorithms. The paper presents the results of experiments on both synthetic and real world data.

PSLIPSA is a computer-aided structured documentation and analysis technique that was developed for, and is being used for, analysis and documentation of requirements and preparation of func- tional specifications for information processing systems. The present status of requirements definition is outlined as the basis for describing the problem which PSL/PSA is intended to solve. The basic concepts of the Problem Statement Language are introduced and the content and use of a number of standard reports that can be produced by the Problem Statement Analyzer are briefly described. The experience to date indicates that computer-aided methods can be used to aid system development during the requirements dbfinition stage and that the main factors holding back such use are not so much related to the particular characteristics and capabilities of PSL/PSA as they are to organizational considerations involved in any change in methodology and procedure.

Practitioners and researchers in the field of software engineering have realized that Non-Functional Requirements have not received due attention and second grade (or no) treatment has been meted out to Non-Functional Requirements. Many software products/systems are finally not acceptable because of such an approach. This casual approach of treating NFR has moved on to Testing also. Testing of NFR has never been taken seriously. Here in this work, we attempt to understand what needs to be done for proper consideration of NFR, so that they are treated as seriously as the Functional Requirements. In an attempt to treat NFR as seriously as FR we work on the testability of NFR by refining an abstract quality concern into concrete NFR statements. We show that quality concerns needs to be analyzed, for identifying and finally converting them into appropriate and unambiguous NFR. Once a high quality of NFR is ensured then the consequent testing of these NFRs will become as effective as that of Functional Requirement. We finally propose a revised model of Problem Analysis and Requirement Specification. A step wise refinement model for quality concern into testable Non Functional Requirement is also proposed.

Bu nitel durum çalışması, bir eğitim fakültesinin örtük programını; öğrenciler, öğretim elemanları ve öğrenme çevresinin mesleki kimlik ve sınıf kültürünü örtük biçimde nasıl şekillendirdiğini incelemektedir. Veriler, dört sınıf düzeyinde 17 şubede katılımcı olmayan sınıf gözlemleri ve 34 öğrenciyle yapılan yarı yapılandırılmış görüşmeler ile toplanmış; metodolojik üçgenlemeyi sağlamak üzere betimsel analiz ile içerik analizi bir arada kullanılmıştır. Gözlemlerden elde edilen bulgular, sınıflarda kadın öğrencilerin daha görünür ve özgüvenli olduğunu; özellikle bağıl değerlendirmeye atfedilen yoğun gruplaşma ve rekabetin akran iletişimini zayıflatabildiğini; çoğu öğretim elemanının erişilebilir, destekleyici ve rol model olarak algılandığını ancak eleştiriye açıklık ile demokratik-otoriter tutumlarda değişkenlik bulunduğunu göstermektedir. Materyal donanımındaki yetersizliklere ilişkin algılar, kurumun araştırma ve öğrenme ortamlarına verdiği değerin sınırlı olduğuna dair örtük mesajlar ortaya çıkarmaktadır. Gözlemler ayrıca, sınıflarda belirgin bir cinsiyet rolü olmamakla birlikte, kız öğrencilerin sayıca fazla olmaları nedeniyle öne çıktığını ve öğrencilerin çoğunun birbirine saygılı davrandığını göstermiştir. Bu sonuçlar, incelenen fakültede örtük programın sınıf dinamikleri, öğretim elemanı-öğrenci ilişkileri ve öğrenme ortamı üzerindeki etkilerini ortaya çıkarmak açısından önem taşımaktadır.

Ontologies are commonly used in computer science either as a reference model to support semantic interoperability in several scenarios, or as a computer-tractable artifact that should be efficiently represented to be processed. This duality poses a tradeoff between expressivity and computational tractability that should be taken care of in different phases of ontology engineering. In this scenario, the choice of the ontology representation language is crucial, since different languages contain different expressivity and ontological commitments, reflecting on the specific set of available constructs. The inadequate use of a representation language, disregarding the goal of each ontology engineering phase, can lead to serious problems to database design and integration, to domain and systems requirements analysis within the software development processes, to knowledge representation and automated reasoning, and so on. This article presents an illustration of these issues by using a real industrial case study in the domain of Oil and Gas Exploration and Production. We explicit the differences between two different representations of this domain, and highlight a number of concepts and ideas (tacit domain knowledge) that were implicit in the original model represented using an ontology-codification language and that became explicit by applying methodological directives underlying an ontologically well-founded modeling language.

While SysML (System Modeling Language) is a leading topic for System Engineering (SE) in all domains, there is no pragmatic implementation of SE for automotive embedded systems and products. In this paper, a proposal is developed to meet the needs of Valeo product lines.

Abstract: Cooperation of processes in different organizations requires the definition of adequate interfaces among processes to model both data exchange and the cooperation logic. In modern e-Applications, in order to interconnect e-Services of several organizations in a highly dynamic environment, the needs arises for a framework that allows a precise and rapid definition of cooperative processes, and for an infrastructure for change management both at design and at run-time. This work presents a framework for cooperative processes, ...

This article describes an Ada set of packages which allows designers to perform resource requirements analysis of AADL specifications. This set of Ada packages is part of Cheddar, an Ada framework that we are developing at the University of Brest [22].The framework provides tools to check if AADL threads will meet their deadline at execution time. Some new AADL properties are proposed to model and analyze dependent AADL thread sets. It also provides some tools to perform memory requirements analysis on AADL specifications.

The statistical view towards data differs with respect to a number of aspects from the traditional view in Computer Science. Consequently, metadata for statistical data have to take into account these peculiarities in operational form. Based on a requirement analysis oriented towards statistical applications a generic metadata model is defined. Using the concept of facet classifications from the library sciences we define a model, which encompasses not only storage and retrieval aspects but also metadata usage in statistical processing. Within the framework of semistructure d data modeling a process oriented data and metadata model for applications in statistical computing is sketched. Applicability of the model is shown in the context of weighting.

The achievement of building evolvable systems depends on how efficiently the changeable requirements are elicited and structured by software engineers. In current requirements approaches changing requirements are not dealt with satisfactorily. Partially, this is due to the crosscutting nature of some of these requirements. Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering tackles the problem of crosscutting requirements, and its concepts can be used to address this problem. This work describes how early aspects, i.e. aspects identified at early stages of software development, could be integrated to an evolutionary requirements model.

Agents provide developers with a flexible way of structuring systems around autonomous, communicative elements. In order to support the efficient development of such systems, design techniques need to be introduced. In this context, we propose a set of UML-based diagrams which can be used to capture structural and behavioral features of the Belief-Desire-Intention agent model. The approach aims at supporting detailed architectural design of multi-agent systems by providing a process to guide the description of agent roles according to the proposed diagrams in the context of the Tropos framework. To illustrate the approach we present a Conference Management System case study.

Aspect-oriented requirements engineering aims at addressing crosscutting concerns, known as aspects, by providing means for their systematic identification, separation, representation and composition. Our goal is to propose a tool to support the aspect-oriented requirements model described in . This tool offers support to the concern specification and composition activities.

Early aspects are crosscutting concerns that are identified in the early life cycle phases of a software system's development. Nominally these phases include the requirements analysis, domain analysis and architecture design phases. Early aspects cannot be localized and tend to be scattered over multiple early life cycle artifacts or artifact elements (such as sections in a requirements document, or modules in an architectural design). Unless these crosscutting concerns can be localized and managed as distinct ...

By nature, web applications involve a myriad of different concerns, which many times crosscut each other. The result is that these crosscutting concerns are scattered throughout different software artifacts provoking information tangling in those concerns. This paper presents an approach for using the problem domain language captured by LEL (Language Extended Lexicon) to improve the modeling of those concerns which affect navigation, i.e. the navigational concerns. It shows how to build partial navigation scenarios with user interaction diagrams, to analyze how they crosscut and, from there, how to obtain information for improving design models. Finally, it discusses how the interleaving of requirements elicitation with language specification allows improving the description of scenarios and the discovering of crosscutting relationships.

Initial results are reported from an ongoing investigation into optimization techniques applicable to multidisciplinary reusable launch vehicle (RLV) design. The test problem chosen for investigation is neither particularly large in scale nor complex in implementation. However, it does have a number of characteristics relevant to more general problems from this class including 1) the use of legacy analysis codes as contributing analyses and 2) non-hierarchical variable coupling between disciplines. Propulsion, trajectory optimization, and mass properties analyses are included in the RLV problem formulation. A commercial design framework is used to assist data exchange and legacy code integration.