Model-Driven requirements engineering process aided by ontologies and natural controlled languages

Researches in Requirements Engineering have been growing in the latest few years. Researchers are concerned with a set of open issues such as: communication between several user profiles involved in software engineering; scope definition; volatility and traceability issues. To cope with these issues a set of works are concentrated in (i) defining processes to collect client s specifications in order to solve scope issues; (ii) defining models to represent requirements to address communication and traceability issues; and (iii) working on mechanisms and processes to be applied to requirements modeling in order to facilitate requirements evolution and maintenance, addressing volatility and traceability issues. We propose an iterative Model-Driven process to solve these issues, based on a double layered CIM to communicate requirements related knowledge to a wider amount of stakeholders. We also present a tool to help requirements engineer through the RE process. Finally we present a case study to illustrate the process and tool s benefits and usage

Uso de modelos i* para enriquecer requisitos em métodos ágeis

The activity of requirements engineering is seen in agile methods as bureaucratic activity making the process less agile. However, the lack of documentation in agile development environment is identified as one of the main challenges of the methodology. Thus, it is observed that there is a contradiction between what agile methodology claims and the result, which occurs in the real environment. For example, in agile methods the user stories are widely used to describe requirements. However, this way of describing requirements is still not enough, because the user stories is an artifact too narrow to represent and detail the requirements. The activities of verifying issues like software context and dependencies between stories are also limited with the use of only this artifact. In the context of requirements engineering there are goal oriented approaches that bring benefits to the requirements documentation, including, completeness of requirements, analysis of alternatives and support to the rationalization of requirements. Among these approaches, it excels the i * modeling technique that provides a graphical view of the actors involved in the system and their dependencies. This work is in the context of proposing an additional resource that aims to reduce this lack of existing documentation in agile methods. Therefore, the objective of this work is to provide a graphical view of the software requirements and their relationships through i * models, thus enriching the requirements in agile methods. In order to do so, we propose a set of heuristics to perform the mapping of the requirements presented as user stories in i * models. These models can be used as a form of documentation in agile environment, because by mapping to i * models, the requirements will be viewed more broadly and with their proper relationships according to the business environment that they will meet

GT4CCI: uma abordagem baseada em grounded theory para a identificação de interesses transversais em documentos de requisitos

When crosscutting concerns identification is performed from the beginning of development, on the activities involved in requirements engineering, there are many gains in terms of quality, cost and efficiency throughout the lifecycle of software development. This early identification supports the evolution of requirements, detects possible flaws in the requirements specification, improves traceability among requirements, provides better software modularity and prevents possible rework. However, despite these several advantages, the crosscutting concerns identification over requirements engineering faces several difficulties such as the lack of systematization and tools that support it. Furthermore, it is difficult to justify why some concerns are identified as crosscutting or not, since this identification is, most often, made without any methodology that systematizes and bases it. In this context, this paper proposes an approach based on Grounded Theory, called GT4CCI, for systematizing and basing the process of identifying crosscutting concerns in the initial stages of the software development process in the requirements document. Grounded Theory is a renowned methodology for qualitative analysis of data. Through the use of GT4CCI it is possible to better understand, track and document concerns, adding gains in terms of quality, reliability and modularity of the entire lifecycle of software

STREAM-AP: um processo para sistematizar a escolha de padrões arquiteturais baseado em requisitos não-funcionais

The importance of non-functional requirements for computer systems is increasing. Satisfying these requirements requires special attention to the software architecture, since an unsuitable architecture introduces greater complexity in addition to the intrinsic complexity of the system. Some studies have shown that, despite requirements engineering and software architecture activities act on different aspects of development, they must be performed iteratively and intertwined to produce satisfactory software systems. The STREAM process presents a systematic approach to reduce the gap between requirements and architecture development, emphasizing the functional requirements, but using the non-functional requirements in an ad hoc way. However, non-functional requirements typically influence the system as a whole. Thus, the STREAM uses Architectural Patterns to refine the software architecture. These patterns are chosen by using non-functional requirements in an ad hoc way. This master thesis presents a process to improve STREAM in making the choice of architectural patterns systematic by using non-functional requirements, in order to guide the refinement of a software architecture

Identificando interesses transversais em modelos de requisitos PL-AOVgraph

The occurrence of problems related to the scattering and tangling phenomenon, such as the difficulty to do system maintenance, increasingly frequent. One way to solve this problem is related to the crosscutting concerns identification. To maximize its benefits, the identification must be performed from early stages of development process, but some works have reported that this has not been done in most of cases, making the system development susceptible to the errors incidence and prone to the refactoring later. This situation affects directly to the quality and cost of the system. PL-AOVgraph is a goal-oriented requirements modeling language which offers support to the relationships representation among requirements and provides separation of crosscutting concerns by crosscutting relationships representation. Therefore, this work presents a semi-automatic method to crosscutting concern identification in requirements specifications written in PL-AOVgraph. An adjacency matrix is used to identify the contributions relationships among the elements. The crosscutting concern identification is based in fan-out analysis of contribution relationships from the informations of adjacency matrix. When identified, the crosscutting relationships are created. And also, this method is implemented as a new module of ReqSys-MDD tool

Modelo de interoperabilidade para utilização dos recursos dos ambientes virtuais de aprendizagem através de dispositivos móveis

The technological evolution has been making the Distance Education accessible for a greater number of citizens anytime and anywhere. The potential increase of the supply for mobile devices integrated to mobile learning environments allows that the information comes out of the physical environment, creating opportunities for students and teachers to create geographically distributed learning scenarios. However, many applications developed for these environments remain isolated from each other and do not become integrated sufficiently into the virtual learning environments (AVA). This dissertation presents an interoperability model between mobile devices and distinct AVA based on webservices. For the conception of this model, requirements engineering and software architecture techniques were used. With the goal of showing the model viability, a mobile application focused on surveys has been developed, and additionally, the main functionalities related to the interoperability were tested