Barbara Paech

Rationale Management in Software Engineering

This is a detailed summary of research on design rationale providing researchers in software engineering with an excellent overview of the subject. Professional software engineers will find many examples, resources and incentives to enhance their ability to make decisions during all phases of the software lifecycle. Software engineering is still primarily a human-based activity and rationale management is concerned with making design and development decisions explicit to all stakeholders involved.

Towards a formalization of the Unified Modeling Language

The Unified Modeling Language UML is a language for specifying, visualizing and documenting object-oriented systems. UML combines the concepts of OOA/OOD, OMT and OOSE and is intended as a standard in the domain of object-oriented analysis and design. Due to the missing formal, mathematical foundation of UML the syntax and the semantics of a number of UML constructs are not precisely defined. This paper outlines a proposal for the formal foundation of UML that is based on a mathematical system model.

Systematic requirements recycling through abstraction and traceability

Ad-hoc recycling between requirements documents of product variants is a major source of requirements defects. We present an approach for systematic requirements recycling based on a combination of abstraction (in terms of a template) and traceability (between requirements). The main features of our approach are the use of conceptual models to determine relationships necessary for correct recycling and the focus on minimizing link selling. This approach can also be used to develop abstraction and traceability guidelines tailored to other application domains and traceability goals, such as change or project management.

A field study of the requirements engineering practice in Australian software industry

Empirical studies have demonstrated that requirements errors introduced during software development are most numerous in the software life-cycle, making software requirements critical determinants of software quality. This article reports an exploratory study which provides insight into industrial practices with respect to requirements engineering (RE). A combination of both qualitative and quantitative data is collected, using semi-structured interviews and a detailed questionnaire from 28 software projects in 16 Australian companies. The contribution of this RE study is threefold: Firstly, it includes a detailed examination of the characteristics of the RE activities involved in the projects. Secondly, it reconstructs the underlying practiced process models. Thirdly, it compares these models to one another and with a number of well-known process models from RE literature to give insight into the gap between RE theory and practice.

MOQARE: misuse-oriented quality requirements engineering

This work presents MOQARE (misuse-oriented quality requirements engineering), a method to explore quality requirements. The aim of MOQARE is to support intuitive and systematic identification of quality requirements. It was developed by integrating and adapting concepts from other methods (like Misuse Cases). It provides a general conceptual model of quality requirements, and a checklist-based process for deriving them in a top-down fashion. This derivation starts from business goals and vague quality requirements and delivers detailed requirements. MOQARE applies to requirements on the system to be developed requirements, but also derives requirements on the development process, including administration and maintenance. It considers normal and extreme use. The relationships among these requirements are modeled in a Misuse Tree. MOQARE has shown its merits in several case studies, one of which is presented here.

Gentzen-Systems for Propositional Temporal Logics

We give sound and complete, cut-free Gentzen-Systems for linear and branching temporal logic with {o, unless} and for linear and branching regular logic. This is the first time that branching time logics with regular operators are investigated.

Rationale-Based Use Case Specification

The requirements specification – as outcome of the requirements engineering process – falls short of capturing other useful information generated during this process, such as the justification for selected requirements, trade-offs negotiated by stakeholders and alternative requirements that were discarded. In the context of evolving systems and distributed development, this information is essential. Rationale methods focus on capturing and structuring this missing information. In this paper, we propose an integrated process with dedicated guidance for capturing requirements and their rationale, discuss its tool support and describe the experiences we made during several case studies with students. Although the idea of integrating rationale methods with requirements engineering is not new, few research projects so far have focused on smooth integration, dedicated tool support and detailed guidance for such methods.

The MORABIT Approach to Runtime Component Testing

Runtime testing is important for improving the quality of software systems. This fact holds true especially for systems which cannot be completely assembled at development time, such as mobile or ad-hoc systems. The concepts of built-in-test (BIT) can be used to cope with runtime testing, but to our knowledge there does not exist an implemented infrastructure for BIT. The MORABIT project realizes such an infrastructure and extends the BIT concepts to allow for a smooth integration of the testing process and the original business functionality execution. In this paper the requirements on the infrastructure and our solution are presented

Reducing verification effort in component-based software engineering through built-in testing

Today component- and service-based technologies play a central role in many aspects of enterprise computing. However, although the technologies used to define, implement, and assemble components have improved significantly over recent years, techniques for verifying systems created from them have changed very little. The correctness and reliability of component-based systems are still usually checked using the traditional testing techniques that were in use before components and services became widespread, and the associated costs and overheads still remain high. This paper presents an approach that addresses this problem by making the system verification process more component-oriented. Based on the notion of built-in tests (BIT)—tests that are packaged and distributed with prefabricated, off-the-shelf components—the approach partially automates the testing process, thereby reducing the level of effort needed to establish the acceptability of the system. The approach consists of a method that defines how components should be written to support and make use of run-time tests, and a resource-aware infrastructure that arranges for tests to be executed when they have a minimal impact on the delivery of system services. After providing an introduction to the principles behind component-based verification and explaining the main features of the approach and its supporting infrastructure, we show by means of a case study how it can reduce system verification effort.

Task-Driven Requirements in Object-Oriented Development

There is no accepted method today that integrates requirements engineering and object-oriented development for user interface and information-intensive systems. In this paper we present the major issues such a method has to deal with and illustrate them with examples from our method TORE (Task and Object-oriented Requirements Engineering).