KPIs and their properties defined with the EXTREME method

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the main instruments of Business Performance Management. KPIs are the measures that are translated to both the strategy and the business process. These measures are often designed for an industry sector with the assumptions about business processes in organizations. However, the assumptions can be too incomplete to guarantee the required properties of KPIs. This raises the need to validate the properties of KPIs prior to their application to performance measurement. This paper applies the method called EXecutable Requirements Engineering Management and Evolution (EXTREME) for validation of the KPI definitions. EXTREME semantically relates the goal modeling, conceptual modeling and protocol modeling techniques into one methodology. The synchronous composition built into protocol modeling enables raceability of goals in protocol models and constructive definitions of a KPI. The application of the method clarifies the meaning of KPI properties and procedures of their assessment and validation.

The synergies between goal sketching and enterprise architecture

This paper introduces a pragmatic and practical method for requirements modeling. The method is built using the concepts of our goal sketching technique together with techniques from an enterprise architecture modeling language. Our claim is that our method will help project managers who want to establish early control of their projects and will also give managers confidence in the scope of their project. In particular we propose the inclusion of assumptions as first class entities in the ArchiMate enterprise architecture modeling language and an extension of the ArchiMate Motivation Model principle to allow radical as well as normative analyses. We demonstrate the usefulness of this method using a simple university library system as an example.

Investigating factors influencing the perception of creativity in web design

In many disciplines, creativity has been recognised as an important part of problem solving. In business, creativity enables the generation of better solutions and provides an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage. In Information Systems (IS) creativity assists developers in finding solutions to difficult problems by helping to efficiently utilise available resources and allows the more effective planning and running of complex projects. One of the most important aspects of IS development is Requirements Engineering (RE), the development activity aimed at understanding the needs and wants of IS customers. While previous RE researchers suggested that creativity is crucial in building high quality information systems, fostering creative outcomes in RE is difficult as it is affected by the multifaceted socioorganisational context within which IS development commonly takes place. This paper reports findings from an empirical study into creativity in RE. Specifically, it reports various contextual factors which were found to influence the creativity of individuals and their teams.

Global software development : the next RE frontier?

Requirements Engineers face an emerging set of challenges, which compound the traditional Requirements Engineering (RE) challenges (stakeholder identification, domain expertise, communication, analytic skills, problem solving, ...) that have arguably still not been fully addressed. This is the challenge of RE in the world of global software development, with requirements teams working in virtual mode (possibly on different continents), with the software having to operate in multiple contexts, addressing the needs of different cultures and legal jurisdictions, and having to build sales in different marketplaces. Further the need arises to specify software that is progressively enhanced through regular releases, rather than the “green field” specification of products.

This theoretical paper introduces these challenges, and presents an initial selection of theoretical models, drawn from many and varied source disciplines, which might be employed to gain insight into various features of RE in support of global software development. To illustrate the potential relevance of this selection of models, a longitudinal case study with a recently identified software developer, to follow the specification and subsequent roll-out of a future release of a software product for sale globally, is introduced. Features of the situation faced by that organisation are highlighted, to illustrate the potential relevance of the diverse models that have been identified.

Using constructivist experiential simulations in RE education

Experiential simulations have been used effectively for teaching business, medicine and engineering. Many are supported by computer systems that create artificial virtual spaces so learners can safely practice intricate professional skills. Surprising few attempts have been made to utilise such approaches in teaching IT/IS principles and requirements engineering (RE) in particular. This paper reports on FAB ATM, which is one of those few learning environments which rely on computer simulation and which have been designed specifically to train IS professionals, and in particular, develop their RE skills. In its framework, FAB ATM combines and balances elements of video-based computer simulation with activities, such as classroom instructions. This paper explains the principles of the FAB ATM design, its coverage of RE activities and the anecdotal experiences of students and staff that have used this environment in practice.

Touch it, feel it and experience it: developing professional IS skills using interview-style experiential simulations

The IS education field has made increasing use of computerised experiential simulations, but few attempts have been made to create an authentic learning environment that combines and balances elements of video-based computer simulation with real-life learning activities. This paper explores the design principles used to develop a CD-ROM simulation where learners use interviewing skills to elicit system requirements from simulated employees in an authentic context. The employees are videoed actors who converse with each other and with learners within a dynamic interaction model. The paper also describes how we combined this simulation with other teaching approaches such as in-class discussions, student team work, formal presentations, etc.

Incorporating design explanation within formal object-oriented method (FOOM)

Requirements engineering is a commencing phase in the development of either software applications or information systems. It is concerned with understanding and specifying the customer's requirements of the system to be delivered. Throughout the literature, this is agreed to be one of the most crucial and, unfortunately, problematic phases in development. Despite the diversity of research directions, approaches and methods, the question of process understanding and management is still limited. Among contemporary approaches to the improvement of the current practice of Requirements Engineering, Formal Object-Oriented Method (FOOM) has been introduced as a new promising solution. The FOOM approach to requirements engineering is based on a synthesis of socio-organisational theory, the object-oriented approach, and mathematical formal specification. The entire FOOM specification process is evolutionary and involves a large volume of changes in requirements. During this process, requirements evolve through various forms of informal, semi-formal, and formal while maintaining a semantic link between these forms and, most importantly, conforming to the customer's requirements. A deep understanding of the complexity of the requirements model and its dynamics is critical in improving requirements engineering process management. This thesis investigates the benefits of documenting both the evolution of the requirements model and the rationale for that evolution. Design explanation explains and justifies the deliberations of, and decisions made during, the design activity. In this thesis, design explanation is used to describe the requirements engineering process in order to improve understandability of, and traceability within, the evolving requirements specification. The design explanation recorded during this research project is also useful in assisting the researcher in gaining insights into the creativity and opportunistic characteristics of the requirements engineering process. This thesis offers an interpretive investigation into incorporating design explanation within FOOM in order to extend and advantage the method. The researcher's interpretation and analysis of collected data highlight an insight-driven and opportunistic process rather than a strictly and systematically predefined one. In fact, the process was not smoothly evolutionary, but involved occasional 'crisis' points at which the model was reconceptualised, simplified and restructured. Therefore, contributions of the thesis lie not only in an effective incorporation of design explanation within FOOM, but also a deep understanding of the dynamic process of requirements engineering. The new understanding of the complexity of the requirements model and its dynamics suggests new directions for future research and forms a basis for a new approach to process management.

Fuzzy concepts and formal methods

It has been recognised that formal methods are useful as a modelling tool in requirements engineering. Specification languages such as Z permit the precise and unambiguous modelling of system properties and behaviour. However some system problems, particularly those drawn from the information systems problem domain, may be difficult to model in crisp or precise terms. It may also be desirable that formal modelling should commence as early as possible, even when our understanding of parts of the problem domain is only approximate. This thesis suggests fuzzy set theory as a possible representation scheme for this imprecision or approximation. A fuzzy logic toolkit that defines the operators, measures and modifiers necessary for the manipulation of fuzzy sets and relations is developed. The toolkit contains a detailed set of laws that demonstrate the properties of the definitions when applied to partial set membership. It also provides a set of laws that establishes an isomorphism between the toolkit notation and that of conventional Z when applied to boolean sets and relations. The thesis also illustrates how the fuzzy logic toolkit can be applied in the problem domains of interest. Several examples are presented and discussed including the representation of imprecise concepts as fuzzy sets and relations, system requirements as a series of linguistically quantified propositions, the modelling of conflict and agreement in terms of fuzzy sets and the partial specification of a fuzzy expert system. The thesis concludes with a consideration of potential areas for future research arising from the work presented here.

Ontology-based automated support for goal–use case model analysis

Combining goal-oriented and use case modeling has been proven to be an effective method in requirements elicitation and elaboration. To ensure the quality of such modeled artifacts, a detailed model analysis needs to be performed. However, current requirements engineering approaches generally lack reliable support for automated analysis of consistency, correctness and completeness (3Cs problems) between and within goal models and use case models. In this paper, we present a goal–use case integration framework with tool support to automatically identify such 3Cs problems. Our new framework relies on the use of ontologies of domain knowledge and semantics and our goal–use case integration meta-model. Moreover, functional grammar is employed to enable the semiautomated transformation of natural language specifications into Manchester OWL Syntax for automated reasoning. The evaluation of our tool support shows that for representative example requirements, our approach achieves over 85 % soundness and completeness rates and detects more problems than the benchmark applications.

Automatic acceptance test case generation from essential use cases

Requirements validation is a crucial process to determine whether client-stakeholders' needs and expectations of a product are sufficiently correct and complete. Various requirements validation techniques have been used to evaluate the correctness and quality of requirements, but most of these techniques are tedious, expensive and time consuming. Accordingly, most project members are reluctant to invest their time and efforts in the requirements validation process. Moreover, automated tool supports that promote effective collaboration between the client-stakeholders and the engineers are still lacking. In this paper, we describe a novel approach that combines prototyping and test-based requirements techniques to improve the requirements validation process and promote better communication and collaboration between requirements engineers and clientstakeholders. To justify the potential of this prototype tool, we also present three types of evaluation conducted on the prototpye tool, which are the usability survey, 3-tool comparison analysis and expert reviews.

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