Antonio de Pádua Albuquerque Oliveira

A client oriented requirements baseline

Traceability, a major issue in software engineering, is seldom present at the initial requirements engineering process. The paper reports a proposal for organizing requirements statements as a model, where change and evolution are taken into consideration. The model uses natural language statements as its basic representation, which helps the communication between clients and software engineers. The model is supported by a customized software system for which a prototype was built and used in an industrial setting.

Exploring Business Process Transparency Concepts

Transparency has been, for long, a general requirement for democratic societies. According to Leite [6], transparency will be a central issue in producing software. This work assumes that, for providing software transparency, it is necessary that the processes to be supported or automated be transparent as well. As such, using a requirements point of view, it is necessary that organizations implement process transparency to enable transparency in their automation or support. This work is based on Business Process Management concepts, NFR framework and quality management.

Integrating scenarios, i*, and AspectT in the context of multi-agent systems

Developing Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) calls for addressing different concerns. Some of them are general and related to the technology and others are particular to each collaborating agent. Our proposal aims to provide a more holistic approach to the construction of MAS. Integrating three different perspectives for information modeling we have achieved a more comprehensible way of dealing, early on, with the different concerns that are akin to MAS. Scenarios is a well known requirements technique; it produces a structured description of one situation that occurs in the real world; i* Framework models organizational contexts using the strategic relationships among actors and; AspectT is a software framework for MAS implementation. In this paper we report our initial findings in integrating these three perspectives. We used a well known example: the Expert Committee, to illustrate the advantage of dealing with these three different perspectives. Our contribution relies on tackling different concerns in an integrated manner during the requirements definition of a MAS development.