STRENGTHENING REQUIREMENT SPECIFICATION IN SUSTAINABLE PROCUREMENT-AN INVESTIGATION OF CHALLENGES

To reap the benefits of sustainability in the construction sector,it is crucial that the stakeholders involved can implement it in practice.Investigations have shown that choices made in the early phases of the building process are of very great importance for the outcome and the initiatives and decisions taken by the build-ing owner are crucial.This paper presents research on Danish building practitioners’ability to make requirements for sustainability in procurement.On the basis of an action research strategy,we asked practitioners to help identify the challenges involved in requiring sustainable solutions through procurement.These included among others a lack of knowledge or experience in sustainable procurement and inter-disciplinary challenges.The research showed that practitioners are able to for-mulate specific requirements for sustainability in procurement.However the challenges found imply that a sustainable approach in procurement is not fully implemented in a Danish context.This suggests that there is a need for guidance in the area,if the practitioners are to move from good intentions to making more specific requirements for sustainability in procurement.

A FORMAL MODEL FOR ANALYZING THE SCR-STYLE REQUIREMENTS SPECIFICATIONS

Based on SCR(Software Cost Reduction), this paper presents a formal mOdel analyzingSCR-style requirements- This model mainly apply state trans1ation rules, semantic computing rules and attributes to define formal sementics of a tabular notation in the SCR requirements method, and may automatically analyze requirements specifications to be specified by the SCR method. Combining with a simp1eexample, this paper introduces how to analyze consistency and completeness of requirements specifica-tlons.

An Evaluation of Value-Oriented Review for Software Requirements Specification

A software requirements specification(SRS)is a detailed description of a software system to be developed.This paper proposes and evaluates a lightweight review approach called value-oriented review(VOR)to detect defects in SRS.This approach comprises setting core values based on SRS and detecting the defects disturbing the core values.To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach,we conducted a controlled experiment to investigate whether reviewers could identify and record the core values based on SRS and find defects disturbing the core values.Results of the evaluation with 56 software engineers showed that 91%of the reviewers identified appropriate core values and 82%of the reviewers detected defects based on the identified core values.Furthermore,the average number of defects detected using the proposed approach was slightly smaller than that detected using perspective-based reading(PBR);however,PBR requires defining review scenarios before attempting to detect any defects.The results also demonstrated that the proposed approach helped reviewers detect the omission defects,which are more difficult to detect from SRS than defects because of ambiguity or incorrect requirements.

Specifying Requirements of Real-Time System with Rules and Templates

This paper presents a model specifying requirements of real-time systems. Different from existing researches, this model mainly uses rules and templates to represent hierarchical FSMs (Finite State Machine). In this model, one rule corresponds to one state transition of FSM and one template corresponds to one FSM. Rules and information with respect to a FSM can be written in a template. So templates include not only state diagrams, but also information that can not be described by FSM, such as performance requirements. The specification using this model consists of a collection of templates and it is easy for users to understand and to review. After introduced the related researches and principles of the model, this paper specifies requirements of a real-time system with this model, and discusses characters of this model in the end.

A Requirements Engineering Environment for Embedded Real-Time Software—SREE

The paper presents the embedded real-time software-oriented requirements engineering environment—SREZ. It involves the whole process of software requirements engineering, including the definition, analysis and checking of requirements ,specifications. We first explain the principles of the executable specification language RTRSM. Subsequently, we introduce the main functions of SREE, illustrate the methods and techniques of checking requirements specifications, especially how to perform simulation execution, combining prototyping method with RTRSM and animated representations. At last, we compare the SREE with other requirements specifications methods and make a summary for SREE＇s advantages.

The User Interfaces Transition Diagram-Editor: A Tool to Simplify User-System Interaction Modeling

The User Interface Transition Diagram (UITD) is a formal modeling notation that simplifies the specification and design of user-system interactions. It is a valuable communication tool for technical and non-technical stakeholders during the requirements elicitation phase, as it provides a simple yet technically complete notation that is easy to understand. In this paper, we investigated the efficiency of creating UITDs using draw.io, a widely used diagramming software, compared to a dedicated UITD editor. We conducted a study to compare the time required to use each tool to complete the task of creating a medium size UITD, as well as the subjective ease of use and satisfaction of participants with the dedicated Editor. Our results show that the UITD editor is more efficient and preferred by participants, highlighting the importance of using specialized tools for creating formal models such as UITDs. The findings of this study have implications for software developers, designers, and other stakeholders involved in the specification and design of user-system interactions.

On the Estimation of the Functional Size of Software from Requirements Specifications

This paper introduces a measurement procedure, called RmFFP, which describes a set of operations for modelling and estimating the size of object-oriented software systems from high-level specifications using the OO-Method Requirement Model. OO-Method is an automatic software production method. The contribution of this work is to systematically define a set of rules that allows estimating the functional size at an early stage of the software production process, in accordance with COSMIC-FFP. To do this, we describe the design, the application, and the analysis of the proposed measurement procedure following the steps of a process model for software measurement. We also report initial results on the evaluation of RmFFP in terms of its reproducibility.

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.

DUSM： A Method for Requirements Specification and Refinement Based on Disciplined Use Cases and Screen Mockups

In this work, we present DUSM （Disciplined Use Cases with Screen Mockups）, a novel method for describing and refining requirements specifications based on disciplined use cases and screen mockups. Disciplined use cases are characterized by a quite stringent template to prevent common mistakes, and to increase the quality of the specifications. Use cases descriptions are formulated in a structured natural language, which allows to reach a good level of precision, avoiding the need for further notations and complex models. Screen mockups are precisely associated with the steps of the use cases scenarios and they present the corresponding GUIs （graphical user interfaces） as seen by the human actors before/after the steps executions, improving the comprehension and the expression of the non-functional requirements on the user interface. DUSM has been proposed and fine-tuned during several editions of a software engineering course at the University of Genova. Then, by means of a series of case studies and experiments, we validated the method and evaluated： 1） its effectiveness in improving the comprehension and, in general, the quality of the produced requirements specification, and 2） its applicability in the industry, where the method has been found useful and not particularly onerous.

Architecture Design for Internet-Based Control Systems

The Internet is playing an important role in information retrieval, and additionally industrial process manipulation. This paper describes an approach to writing requirements specifications for Internet-based control systems, from which architectures can be derived. The requirements specifications developed are described in terms of a functional model, which is then extended to form an information architecture. Distinct from the functional model, the information architecture provides an indication as to the architectural structure of subsequently developed Internet-based control systems. Three general control structures are generated from the analysis of an information architecture. An integrated-distributed architecture is derived as an ideal implementation, in which a control system is linked to the Internet at all levels of a control system hierarchy.

An Empirical Study on the Impact of Automation on the Requirements Analysis Process

Requirements analysis is an important phase in a software project. The analysis is often performed in an informal way by specialists who review documents looking for ambiguities, technical inconsistencies and incomplete parts. Automation is still far from being applied in requirements analyses, above all since natural languages are informal and thus difficult to treat automatically. There are only a few tools that can analyse texts. One of them, called QuARS, was developed by the Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell＇Informazione and can analyse texts in terms of ambiguity. This paper describes how QuARS was used in a formal empirical experiment to assess the impact in terms of effectiveness and efficacy of the automation in the requirements review process of a software company.