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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Formal Method to Model Early Requirement of Multi-Agent System

A formal specification language iFL based on i* framework is presented in this paper to formally specify and analyze the early requirment of multi-agent system. It is a branching temporal logic which defines the concepts and models in i* framework in a rigorous way. The method to transform the i* models to iFL formal specification is also put forward. Key words Agent - early requirement - logic - requirement engineering CLC number TP 18 Foundation item: Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (60373022)Biography: MAO Xin-jun (1970-), male, Ph. D, Associate professor, research direction: object-agent software engineering, Agent theory.

Usability Evaluation Through Fuzzy AHP-TOPSIS Approach: Security Requirement Perspective

Most of the security strategies today are primarily designed to provide security protection,rather than to solve one of the basic security issues related to adequate software product architecture.Several models,frameworks and methodologies have been introduced by the researchers for a secure and sustainable software development life cycle.Therefore it is important to assess the usability of the popular security requirements engineering(SRE)approaches.A significant factor in the management and handling of successful security requirements is the assessment of security requirements engineering method performance.This assessment will allow changes to the engineering process of security requirements.The consistency of security requirements depends heavily on the usability of security requirements engineering.Several SRE approaches are available for use and each approach takes into account several factors of usability but does not cover every element of usability.There seems to be no realistic implementation of such models because the concept of usability is not specific.This paper aims at specifying the different taxonomy of usability and design hierarchical usability model.The taxonomy takes into account the common quality assessment parameters that combine variables,attributes,and characteristics identified in different approaches used for security requirements engineering.The multiple-criteria decision-making(MCDM)model used in this paper for usability evaluation is called the fuzzy AHP-TOPSIS model which can conveniently be incorporated into the current approach of software engineering.Five significant usability criteria are identified and used to evaluate the six different alternatives.Such strategies are graded as per their expected values of usability.

Economical Requirements Elicitation Techniques During COVID-19: A Systematic Literature Review

Requirements elicitation is a fundamental phase of software development in which an analyst discovers the needs of different stakeholders and transforms them into requirements.This phase is cost-and time-intensive,and a project may fail if there are excessive costs and schedule overruns.COVID-19 has affected the software industry by reducing interactions between developers and customers.Such a lack of interaction is a key reason for the failure of software projects.Projects can also fail when customers do not know precisely what they want.Furthermore,selecting the unsuitable elicitation technique can also cause project failure.The present study,therefore,aimed to identify which requirements elicitation technique is the most cost-effective for large-scale projects when time to market is a critical issue or when the customer is not available.To that end,we conducted a systematic literature review on requirements elicitation techniques.Most primary studies identified introspection as the best technique,followed by survey and brainstorming.This finding suggests that introspection should be the first choice of elicitation technique,especially when the customer is not available or the project has strict time and cost constraints.Moreover,introspection should also be used as the starting point in the elicitation process of a large-scale project,and all known requirements should be elicited using this technique.

Intelligent Identification and Resolution of Software Requirement Conflicts:Assessment and Evaluation

Considerable research has demonstrated how effective requirements engineering is critical for the success of software projects.Requirements engineering has been established and recognized as one of the most important aspects of software engineering as of late.It is noteworthy to mention that requirement consistency is a critical factor in project success,and conflicts in requirements lead to waste of cost,time,and effort.A considerable number of research studies have shown the risks and problems caused by working with requirements that are in conflict with other requirements.These risks include running overtime or over budget,which may lead to project failure.At the very least,it would result in the extra expended effort.Various studies have also stated that failure in managing requirement conflicts is one of the main reasons for unsuccessful software projects due to high cost and insufficient time.Many prior research studies have proposed manual techniques to detect conflicts,whereas other research recommends automated approaches based on human analysis.Moreover,there are different resolutions for conflicting requirements.Our previous work proposed a scheme for dealing with this problem using a novel intelligent method to detect conflicts and resolve them.A rule-based system was proposed to identify conflicts in requirements,and a genetic algorithm(GA)was used to resolve conflicts.The objective of this work is to assess and evaluate the implementation of the method of minimizing the number of conflicts in the requirements.The methodology implemented comprises two different stages.The first stage,detecting conflicts using a rule-based system,demonstrated a correct result with 100% accuracy.The evaluation of using the GA to resolve and reduce conflicts in the second stage also displayed a good result and achieved the desired goal as well as the main objective of the research.

A Defect Detection Method for the Primary Stage of Software Development

In the early stage of software development,a software requirements specification(SRS)is essential,and whether the requirements are clear and explicit is the key.However,due to various reasons,there may be a large number of misunderstandings.To generate high-quality software requirements specifications,numerous researchers have developed a variety of ways to improve the quality of SRS.In this paper,we propose a questions extraction method based on SRS elements decomposition,which evaluates the quality of SRS in the form of numerical indicators.The proposed method not only evaluates the quality of SRSs but also helps in the detection of defects,especially the description problem and omission defects in SRSs.To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method,we conducted a controlled experiment to compare the ability of checklist-based review(CBR)and the proposed method in the SRS review.The CBR is a classicmethod of reviewing SRS defects.After a lot of practice and improvement for a long time,CBR has excellent review ability in improving the quality of software requirements specifications.The experimental results with 40 graduate studentsmajoring in software engineering confirmed the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed method.However,the shortcomings and deficiencies of the proposed method are also observed through the experiment.Furthermore,the proposed method has been tried out by engineers with practical work experience in software development industry and received good feedback.

Developing architecture of a traveler information system for dynamic equilibrium in traffic networks

Having criticized the current architecture of Advanced Traveler Information Systems （ATISs）, this work discusses a new base of requirements to develop a new paradigm for traffic information systems. It mainly integrates three dimensions within a traffic system： drivers＇ pattern of behavior and preferences, urban traffic desires, and capabilities of traffic information service providers. Based on the above, functional segments from several related backgrounds are brought together to structure a new architecture, called Interactive Traveler Information System （ITIS）. The main interactive feature of this new architecture is a two-way communication track between drivers and the traffic information system provider-in fact, a decision on choosing a road at a particular time for an individual will be made based on the utility of both sides. This new configuration consists of driver-side smartphone application, centric traffic prediction, and decision-maker units, which will shape a new approach of decision-making processes. These all work together to satisfy the designated goal of ITIS, which is preserving the Wardrop equilibrium condition in the traffic network level. Finally, we concentrate on a comparison study, which shows a differentiation between performance of the proposed ITIS and the current ATIS model in a real situation. This has been done with simulations of analogical scenarios. The most noticeable advantage of the proposed architecture is not being limited to a saturation limit, and the positive effect of increasing system penetration in the performance of the newly introduced information system. In conclusion, new research subjects are suggested to be carried out.

Automatic Semantic Analysis of Software Requirements Through Machine Learning and Ontology Approach

Nowadays,software requirements are still mainly analyzed manually,which has many drawbacks(such as a large amount of labor consumption,inefficiency,and even inaccuracy of the results).The problems are even worse in domain analysis scenarios because a large number of requirements from many users need to be analyzed.In this sense,automatic analysis of software requirements can bring benefits to software companies.For this purpose,we proposed an approach to automatically analyze software requirement specifications(SRSs) and extract the semantic information.In this approach,a machine learning and ontology based semantic role labeling(SRL) method was used.First of all,some common verbs were calculated from SRS documents in the E-commerce domain,and then semantic frames were designed for those verbs.Based on the frames,sentences from SRSs were selected and labeled manually,and the labeled sentences were used as training examples in the machine learning stage.Besides the training examples labeled with semantic roles,external ontology knowledge was used to relieve the data sparsity problem and obtain reliable results.Based on the Sem Cor and Word Net corpus,the senses of nouns and verbs were identified in a sequential manner through the K-nearest neighbor approach.Then the senses of the verbs were used to identify the frame types.After that,we trained the SRL labeling classifier with the maximum entropy method,in which we added some new features based on word sense,such as the hypernyms and hyponyms of the word senses in the ontology.Experimental results show that this new approach for automatic functional requirements analysis is effective.

Automated Analysis of the SCR-StyleRequirements Specifications

The SCR (Software Cost Reduction) requirements method is aneffective method for specifying software system requirements. This paper presents aformal model analyzing SCR-style requirements. The analysis model mainly appliesstate translation rules, semantic computing rules and attributes to define formal se-mantics of a tabular notation in the SCR requirements method, and may be used toanalyze requirements specifications to be specified by the SCR requirements method.Using a simple example, this paper introduces how to analyze consistency and com-pleteness of requirements specifications.

Requirements Analyses Integrating Goals and Problem Analysis Techniques

One of the difficulties that goal-oriented requirements analyses encounters is that the efficiency of the goal refinement is based on the analysts＇ subjective knowledge and experience. To improve the efficiency of the requirements elicitation process, engineers need approaches with more systemized analysis techniques. This paper integrates the goal-oriented requirements language i＊ with concepts from a structured problem analysis notation, problem frames （PF）. The PF approach analyzes software design as a contextualized problem which has to respond to constraints imposed by the environment. The proposed approach is illustrated using the meeting scheduler exemplar. Results show that integration of the goal and the problem analysis enables simultaneous consideration of the designer＇s subjective intentions and the physical environmental constraints.

A Visualization Method of Requirement Checking Based on Software Behavior

In order to verify requirements model/document the consistency between software and users＇ true minds, we present a software behavior-oriented requirements visualization method. The implementation method for software behavior-oriented requirements visualization is advanced in this paper first. Then, the basis language is introduced as the foundation of the method. At last, we put forward the tool platform that can achieve the requirement visualization, The result demonstrates that the method can generate requirement animation rapidly to check the correctness of the requirement. It can effectively reduce the requirements change and save a lot of software development costs.

A New Method for the Development of Posts and Telecommunications Information System

A new method for the development of post and telecommunication information systems (PTIS) is presented in the paper. The advantages of traditional methods such as life-cycle method, prototyping method, and object-oriented method are synthesized in the new method. By establishing a general model of PTIS, the new method makes the developing life cycle shorter, quicker and more flexible.

Interactive Inconsistency Fixing in Feature Modeling

Feature models have been widely adopted to reuse the requirements of a set of similar products in a domain. In feature models＇ construction, one basic task is to ensure the consistency of feature models, which often involves detecting and fixing of inconsistencies in feature models. While many approaches have been proposed, most of them focus on detecting inconsistencies rather than fixing inconsistencies. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic-priority based approach to interactively fixing inconsistencies in feature models, and report an implementation of a system that not only automatically recommends a solution to fixing inconsistencies but also supports domain analysts to gradually reach the desirable solution by dynamically adjusting priorities of constraints. The key technical contribution is, as far as we are aware, the first application of the constraint hierarchy theory to feature modeling, where the degree of domain analysts＇ confidence on constraints is expressed by using priority and inconsistencies are resolved by deleting one or more lower-priority constraints. Two case studies demonstrate the usability and scalability （efficiency） of our new approach.

EAFoC： Enterprise Architecture Framework Based on Commonality

The recent rapid development in information systems （ISs） has resulted in a critical need for integration and interoperability between heterogeneous ISs in various domains, using specific commonalities. However, stovepipe systems have been caused due to inconsistencies in planning IS architecture among stakeholders. So far, there has been no research on an enterprise architecture framework （EAF） that can satisfy with the coefficient factors of system architecture （SA） and enterprise architecture （EA）. This paper proposes a new EAF that can resolve the problems inherent in existing legacy EAFs and their features. EAFoC （Enterprise Architecture Framework based on Commonality） is based on commonality that can be satisfied as the coefficient factors in both SA and EA within a common information technology （IT） domain. Thus, it should be possible to integrate an established heterogeneous framework for each stakeholder＇s view. Consequently, the most important contribution of this paper is to establish the appropriate EAFoC for the development of consistent IS architecture, smooth communication among stakeholders, systematic integration management of diversified and complicated new IT technologies, interoperability among heterogeneous ISs, and reusability based on commonality with other platforms.