Classification and Comprehension of Software Requirements Using Ensemble Learning

The software development process mostly depends on accurately identifying both essential and optional features.Initially,user needs are typically expressed in free-form language,requiring significant time and human resources to translate these into clear functional and non-functional requirements.To address this challenge,various machine learning(ML)methods have been explored to automate the understanding of these requirements,aiming to reduce time and human effort.However,existing techniques often struggle with complex instructions and large-scale projects.In our study,we introduce an innovative approach known as the Functional and Non-functional Requirements Classifier(FNRC).By combining the traditional random forest algorithm with the Accuracy Sliding Window(ASW)technique,we develop optimal sub-ensembles that surpass the initial classifier’s accuracy while using fewer trees.Experimental results demonstrate that our FNRC methodology performs robustly across different datasets,achieving a balanced Precision of 75%on the PROMISE dataset and an impressive Recall of 85%on the CCHIT dataset.Both datasets consistently maintain an F-measure around 64%,highlighting FNRC’s ability to effectively balance precision and recall in diverse scenarios.These findings contribute to more accurate and efficient software development processes,increasing the probability of achieving successful project outcomes.

Requirement Engineering for E-Coaching in Higher Education

This paper presents a requirement engineering for developing an e-coaching environment in the higher education sector. This research demonstrates that IT experts encounter challenges in establishing a system that matches a university’s expectations, as they are usually uncertain about its goals and system requirements. The paper illustrates a business goal-focused requirement induction technique, which encompasses demonstrating the business procedures through Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN), assessing the university goals via the tree diagram, and drawing out the system requirements from the university objectives through UML state diagrams. A case study of supporting the development of a new IT course is used as a case study and applied using BPMN.

Crowdsourced Requirements Engineering Challenges and Solutions:A Software Industry Perspective

Software crowdsourcing(SW CS)is an evolving software development paradigm,in which crowds of people are asked to solve various problems through an open call(with the encouragement of prizes for the top solutions).Because of its dynamic nature,SW CS has been progressively accepted and adopted in the software industry.However,issues pertinent to the understanding of requirements among crowds of people and requirements engineers are yet to be clarified and explained.If the requirements are not clear to the development team,it has a significant effect on the quality of the software product.This study aims to identify the potential challenges faced by requirements engineers when conducting the SW–CS based requirements engineering(RE)process.Moreover,solutions to overcome these challenges are also identified.Qualitative data analysis is performed on the interview data collected from software industry professionals.Consequently,20 SW–CS based RE challenges and their subsequent proposed solutions are devised,which are further grouped under seven categories.This study is beneficial for academicians,researchers and practitioners by providing detailed SW–CS based RE challenges and subsequent solutions that could eventually guide them to understand and effectively implement RE in SW CS.

Effective Hybrid Content-Based Collaborative Filtering Approach for Requirements Engineering

Requirements engineering(RE)is among the most valuable and critical processes in software development.The quality of this process significantly affects the success of a software project.An important step in RE is requirements elicitation,which involves collecting project-related requirements from different sources.Repositories of reusable requirements are typically important sources of an increasing number of reusable software requirements.However,the process of searching such repositories to collect valuable project-related requirements is time-consuming and difficult to perform accurately.Recommender systems have been widely recognized as an effective solution to such problem.Accordingly,this study proposes an effective hybrid content-based collaborative filtering recommendation approach.The proposed approach will support project stake-holders in mitigating the risk of missing requirements during requirements elicitation by identifying related requirements from software requirement repositories.The experimental results on the RALIC dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach considerably outperforms baseline collaborative filtering-based recom-mendation methods in terms of prediction accuracy and coverage in addition to mitigating the data sparsity and cold-start item problems.

Hermeneutical Engineering of Requirements

The Software Engineering aims to develop, within the deadlines and costs established, quality software and that meets the needs of its users. To be made the definition of what the software should do (to establish its purpose), it included the execution of activity the Requirements Engineering, where the context of software to be developed is identified, examined and specified. All other activities of software development depend primarily on this activity. However, there is a problem increasingly in evidence: understand the context of software to be developed. This article aims to present a proposal to face this problem through the use of specific hermeneutical methods for the Requirements Engineering, which will help the software development team understand the original needs of the business to be attended. The basic idea is to produce a hermeneutic specification acceptable, which will be used for the extraction and the specification of the software requirements to be developed. In essence, the hermeneutics focuses on the true interpretation and understanding in contextualized of what is intended to know. The Hermeneutical Engineering of Requirements comes to be the result of the adequacy of methods hermeneutical to assist, specifically the activity of Engineering of Requirements.

A New Maturity Model for Requirements Engineering Process: An Overview

It is widely acknowledged that Requirements Engineering (RE) has an important implication for the overall success of software or system development projects. As more and more organizations consider RE as the principal problem areas in the projects, improving RE process therefore appears critical for future business success. Moreover, nowadays there are evidences that support improving RE process maturity can contributes to improved business performance. There exist generic Software Process Improvement (SPI) standards, specialised RE process improvement models as well as guidance and advices on RE. However, they suffer from various issues that limit their adoption by organizations that are interested to assess and improve their RE process capability. Therefore, the research presented in this paper proposes a new RE process improvement model. The model is built by adapting and expanding the structure of the continuous representation of the formal maturity framework Capability Maturity Model Integration for Development (CMMI-DEV) developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) through three rounds of development and validation stages, which involved RE and CMMI expert panel in the software industry. This paper aims to provide an overview on what, why and how we build the maturity model for RE. The intention is to provide a foundation for future development in the area of RE process improvement.

A Knowledge Management Framework in Software Requirements Engineering Based on the SECI Model

Software requirements engineering deals with: elicitation, specification, and validation of software requirements. Furthermore there is a need to facilitate collaboration amongst stakeholders and analysts. Fewer efforts were deployed to support them in performing their job on a day to day basis. To solve this problem we use knowledge management for software requirements engineering. This paper proposes a knowledge management framework, based on the SECI model of knowledge creation, aimed at exploiting tacit and explicit knowledge related to software requirements within a given software project. The core part of the proposed framework is a set of four sub systems “Socializer”;“Externalizer”;“Combiner”;and “Internalizer”, attached to a couple of domain ontologies and a set of knowledge assets. Indeed we aim to facilitate a semantic based interpretation of knowledge assets related to software requirements by restricting their interpretation through the application domain and software requirements ontologies. We anticipate that this framework would be very helpful for stakeholders as well as analysts to exchange and manage their knowledge within a given software project. We show in the case study, through a virtual payroll project using the two-step approach: domain level requirements plus design level requirements, how the key elicitation SRE techniques are used during the first phase of domain requirements elicitation through the four subsystems of our framework.

Barriers and Challenges to the Sustainability Requirements Implementation in Public Procurement of Engineering Works and Services

The environmental damage arising from the construction and engineering services was responsible for the appearance of several norms and resolutions regulating and directing the sector’s performance. In this article, we research how professionals with experience in public bids assess the difficulty degree of the implementation of those requirements and how they assess the environmental legislation regarding the protection and conservation of the environment, impact on costs, deadlines and the solution to environmental problems. The results show that industry professionals consider as “high” the level of difficulty to implement the addressed sustainability requirements, and that the Brazilian environmental legislation does not comply with its environmental protection role, increases the possibility of delays and costs of projects and services and hampers the emergence of solutions that could solve environmental problems.

Introduction to a Requirements Engineering Framework for Aeronautics

This paper introduces a framework to produce and to manage quality requirements of embedded aeronautical systems, called the ‘Requirements Engineering Framework’ (REF). It aims at making the management of the requirement lifecycle easier, from the specification of the purchaser’s needs, to their implementation in the final products, and also their verification, while controlling costs. REF is based on the main standards of aeronautics, in particular RTCA DO-254, and RTCA DO-178B standards. An implementation of REF, using the IBM Rational DOORS and IBM Rational Change tools, is also presented in this paper.

Process-Oriented Requirements Engineering: User-Centric LORS Framework

In recent years, the process orientation requirements engineering field has received significant interest. However, dealing with ordinary users within an enterprise for developing as-is business process is very complex because this requires skills, responsibility, knowledge, and expertise of business processes. This research answers the following questions: 1) how to systematically gather information regarding as-is business process requirements in an informal environment and by non-expert users? and 2) how can an enterprise refine the identified business process with a semantic process model? The primary purpose of this research is to develop a supporting framework that is suitable for the definition of an as-is business process to be deployed within the enterprise environment. Hence, the focus is on gathering requirements to define the as-is business process. This framework concentrates on three significant aspects of this process: development, refinement, and serialization the semantics of the process model. To accomplish this objective, the LORS framework has been proposed, which consists of four phases (List, Order, Refinement, and Serialization). The framework presents a new unique technique to identify the business process, refine the process, and generate the model semantics. This study assumes that a simple and complete framework will help non-expert users define a high-quality as-is process, such that enhance and facilitate the matching process with existing reference models. We present a case study, evaluate the case study relative to specified criteria, and research the limitations and implications discovered from our research. This research concludes that the LORS framework is simple, flexible, visible, interactive, dynamic, and effective.

A Metamodel for Agile Requirements Engineering

Value delivery is becoming an important asset for an organization due to increasing competition in industry. Therefore, companies apply Agile Software Development (ASD) to be more competitive and reduce time to market. Using ASD for the development of systems implies that established approaches of Requirements Engineering (RE) undergo some changes in order to be more flexible to changing requirements. To this end, the field of agile RE is emergent and different process models for agile RE have arisen. The aim of this paper is to build an abstract layer about the variety of existing process models by means of a metamodel for agile RE. It has been created in several iterations and relies on the evaluation of related process models. Furthermore, we have derived process models for agile RE in industry by presenting instances of the metamodel in two different cases: one is based on Scrum whereas the other is based on Kanban. This paper contributes to the software development body of knowledge by delivering a metamodel for agile RE that supports researchers and practitioners modeling and improving their own process models. We can conclude that the agile RE metamodel is highly relevant for the industry as well as for the research community, since we have derived it following empirical research in the field of ASD.

Icons:Visual Representation to Enrich Requirements Engineering Work

Adapting icons in requirements engineering can support the multifaceted needs of stakeholders. Conventional approaches to RE are mainly highlighted in diagrams. This paper introduces icon-based information as a way to represent ideas and concepts in the requirements engineering domain. We report on icon artifacts that support requirements engineering work such as priority types, status states and stakeholder kinds. We evaluate how users interpret meanings of icons and the efficacy of icon prototypes shaped to represent those requirements attributes. Our hypothesis is whether practitioners can recognize the icons’ meaning in terms of their functional representation. According to the empirical data from 45 participants, the findings demonstrate the probability of providing users with icons and their intended functions that correspond to RE artifacts in a novel yet effective manner. Based on these findings, we suggest that icons could enrich stakeholders’ perception of the RE process as a whole;however, meaningful interpretation of an icon is subject to the user’s prior knowledge and experience.

The Analysis and Proposed Modifications to ISO/IEC 25030—Software Engineering—Software Quality Requirements and Evaluation—Quality Requirements

The quality of the software product is a crucial factor that contributes to its success. Therefore, it is important to specify the right software quality requirements that will establish the basis for desired quality of the final system/software product. There are several known methodologies/ processes that support the specification of the system/software functional requirements starting from the user needs to finally obtain the system requirements that the developers can implement through their development process. System/software quality requirements are interdependent with functional requirements, which means that the system/software quality requirements are meant to be specified in parallel with the latter. The ISO/IEC 25000 [1] SQuaRE series of standards include the standard ISO/IEC 25030—Software engineering—Software Quality Requirements and Evaluation—Quality requirements [2], which has as main goal to help specify software quality requirements. As to date, this standard does not offer clear and concise steps that a software quality engineer could follow in order to specify them. This article presents modifications recommended for ISO/IEC 25030 standard, with, among the others, a new requirements definition process that allows for specifying the system/software quality requirements taking into account the existing published system and software quality model ISO/IEC 25010 [3] as well as all the stake- holders of the project.

On the Assessment of Generative AI in Requirements Analysis and Modeling Tasks with UML:An Exploratory Study

Generative AI is rapidly employed by software developers to generate code or other software artifacts.However,the analysis and assessment of generative AI with respect to requirements analysis and modeling tasks,especially with UML,has received little attention.This paper investigates the capabilities of generative AI to aid in the creation of three types of UML models:UML use case models,class diagrams,and sequence diagrams.For this purpose,we designed an AI-aided UML modeling task in our course on software requirements modeling.50 undergraduates who majored in Software Engineering at Wuhan University completed the modeling task and the corresponding online survey.Our findings show that generative AI can help create these three types of UML models,but its performance is limited to identifying essential modeling elements of these UML models.

An Approach towards Goal-Oriented Requirements Ontology: Consistency and Completeness Based Requirements Analysis

The paper presents a new approach to managing software requirement elicitation techniques with a high level of analyses based on domain ontology techniques, where we established a mapping between user scenario, structured requirement, and domain ontology techniques to improve many attributes such as requirement consistency, completeness and eliminating duplicate requirements to reduce risk of overrun time and budgets. One of the main targets of requirement engineering is to develop a requirement document with high quality. So, we proposed a user interface to collect all vital information about the project directly from the regular user and requirement engineering;After that, the proposal will generate an ontology based on semantic relations and rules. Requirements Engineering tries to keep requirements throughout a project’s life cycle consistent necessities clear, and up to date. This prototype allows mapping requirement scenarios into ontology elements for semantically interrupted. The general points of our prototype are to guarantee the identification requirements and improved nature of the Software Requirements Specification (SRS) by solving incomplete and conflicting information in the requirements specification.

Quintessence of Traditional and Agile Requirement Engineering

Requirement gathering for software development project is the most crucial stage and thus requirement engineering (RE) occupies the chief position in the software development. Countless techniques concerning the RE processes exist to make sure the requirements are coherent, compact and complete in all respects. In this way different aspects of RE are dissected and detailed upon. A comparison of RE in Agile and RE in Waterfall is expatiated and on the basis of the literature survey the overall Agile RE process is accumulated. Agile being a technique produces high quality software in relatively less time as compared to the conventional waterfall methodology. The paramount objective of this study is to take lessons from RE that Agile method may consider, if quality being the cardinal concern. The study is patterned on the survey of the previous research reported in the coexisting literature and the practices which are being pursued in the area.

Understanding Requirement Engineering for Context-Aware Service-Based Applications

Requirements of software systems tend to change over time. The speed of this tendency depends on the application domain the software system under consideration belongs to. If we consider novel contexts such as pervasive systems and systems supporting dynamic B2B interaction, requirements change so fast that the research community is studying how to build systems that are able to self-adapt on the fly to some of these changes. When this happens, the system does not need to undergo through a new development cycle thus increasing its availability and, to a certain extent, its robustness. So far, the research in the area of self-adaptive systems has been focusing on the definition of the mechanisms for supporting self-adaptation. We argue that what is missing now is a structured and robust design process associated to these mechanisms. This design process should include a Requirement Engineering (RE) phase that somewhat differs from the traditional one. However, the identification of requirements for adaptation requires a good knowledge of the context in which the system will be executed. In this work, we consider the modeling of such context as part of the RE phase and we particularly focus on Service-Based Applications (SBAs). We argue that RE activities should be supported at run-time to handle context changes and to support adaptation for SBAs. We survey the state of the art for what concerns the elicitation, modeling, and analysis of requirements and will highlight some issues and challenges in order to support adaptation for SBAs.

A New Method for Optimum Allocation of Design Requirements in Aircraft Conceptual Design

A new method, Collaborative Allocation （CA）, is proposed to solve the large-scale optimum allocation problem in aircraft conceptual design. According to the characteristics of optimum allocation in aircraft conceptual design. The principle and mathematical model of CA are established. The optimum allocation problem is decomposed into one main optimization problem and several sub-optimization problems. A group of design requirements for subsystems are provided by the main system respectively, and the subsystems execute their own optimizations or further provide the detailed design requirements to the bottom components of aircraft, such as spars, ribs and skins, etc. The subsystems minimize the discrepancy between their own local variables and the corresponding allocated values, and then return the optimization results to main optimization. The main optimization is performed to reallocate the design requirements for improving the integration performance and progressing toward the compatibilities among subsystems. CA provides the general optimum allocation architecture and is easy to be carried out. Furthermore, the concurrent computation can also be realized. Two examples of optimum reliability allocation are used to describe the implementation procedure of CA for two-level allocation and three-level allocation respectively, and to validate preliminarily its correctness and effectiveness. It is shown that the developed method can be successfully used in optimum allocation of design requirements. Then taking weight requirement allocation as example, the mathematical model and solution procedure for collaborative allocation of design requirements in aircraft conceptual design are briefly depicted.