Begoña Moros

Requirements Reuse for Improving Information Systems Security: A Practitioner’s Approach

Information systems security issues have usually been considered only after the system has been developed completely, and rarely during its design, coding, testing or deployment. However, the advisability of considering security from the very beginning of the system development has recently begun to be appreciated, and in particular in the system requirements specification phase. We present a practical method to elicit and specify the system and software requirements, including a repository containing reusable requirements, a spiral process model, and a set of requirements documents templates. In this paper, this method is focused on the security of information systems and, thus, the reusable requirements repository contains all the requirements taken from MAGERIT, the Spanish public administration risk analysis and management method, which conforms to ISO 15408, Common Criteria Framework. Any information system including these security requirements must therefore pass a risk analysis and management study performed with MAGERIT. The requirements specification templates are hierarchically structured and are based on IEEE standards. Finally, we show a case study in a system of our regional administration aimed at managing state subsidies.

REMM-Studio: an Integrated Model-Driven Environment for Requirements Specification, Validation and Formatting.

In order to integrate requirements into the current Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach, the traditional document-based requirements specification process should be changed into a requirements modelling process. To achieve this we propose a requirements metamodel called REMM (Requirements Engineering MetaModel) which includes the elements that should appear in a requirements model (requirements, stakeholders, test cases, etc.) together with the relationships that may appear between them. This metamodel is the basis of the REMM-Studio environment which enables: (1) to build graphical requirements models, (2) to validate them against the metamodel and against a set of additional OCL constraints, and (3) to automatically generate a navigable Software Requirements Specification (SRS) document as the main deliverable of the Requirements Engineering process. REMM-Studio is expected to ease the integration of requirements with other development models (e.g. component models) and to facilitate the validation of the SRS thanks to its navigability.

Towards use case and conceptual models through business modeling

A guide to requirements modeling is presented in this paper, in which use cases and the conceptual model are directly obtained from a business modeling based on UML activity diagrams. After determining the business processes of the organization, and describing their workflows by means of activity diagrams, use cases are elicited and structured starting from the activities of each process, while the concepts of the conceptual model are obtained from the data that flow between activities. Furthermore, business rules are identified and included in a glossary, as part of the data and activities specification. One notable aspect of our proposal is that use case and conceptual modeling are performed at the same time, thus making the identification and specification of suitable use cases easier. Both use case and conceptual modeling belong to the requirements analysis phase, which is part of a complete process model on whose definition we are currently working. This process is being experimented in a mediumsized organism of a Regional Public Administration.

Transforming and tracing reused requirements models to home automation models

Context: Model-Driven Software Development (MDSD) has emerged as a very promising approach to cope with the inherent complexity of modern software-based systems. Furthermore, it is well known that the Requirements Engineering (RE) stage is critical for a projects success. Despite the importance of RE, MDSD approaches commonly leave textual requirements specifications to one side. Objective: Our aim is to integrate textual requirements specifications into the MDSD approach by using the MDSD techniques themselves, including metamodelling and model transformations. The proposal is based on the assumption that a reuse-based Model-Driven Requirements Engineering (MDRE) approach will improve the requirements engineering stage, the quality of the development models generated from requirements models, and will enable the traces from requirements to other development concepts (such as analysis or design) to be maintained. Method: The approach revolves around the Requirements Engineering Metamodel, denominated as REMM, which supports the definition of the boilerplate based textual requirements specification languages needed for the definition of model transformation from application requirements models to platform-specific application models and code. Results: The approach has been evaluated through its application to Home Automation (HA) systems. The HA Requirement Specification Language denominated as HAREL is used to define application requirements models which will be automatically transformed and traced to the application model conforming to the HA Domain Specific Language. Conclusions: An anonymous online survey has been conducted to evaluate the degree of acceptance by both HA application developers and MDSD practitioners. The main conclusion is that 66.7% of the HA experts polled strongly agree that the automatic transformation of the requirements models to HA models improves the quality of the HA models. Moreover, 58.3% of the HA participants strongly agree with the usefulness of the traceability matrix which links requirements to HA functional units in order to discover which devices are related to a specific requirement. We can conclude that the experts we have consulted agree with the proposal we are presenting here, since the average mark given is 4 out of 5.

Transforming the OOram Three-Model Architecture into a UML-based Process.

1 Partially granted by the CICYT (Science and Technology Joint Committee TIC97-0593-C05-02. Abstract Three-model architecture (TMA) is a software process defined for the OOram method, and aimed at developing business information systems. In our experience, TMA is very helpful in building client-server applications using object-oriented and database technology. However, in order to use a standard notation and to take full advantage of the benefits provided by use case-driven processes, it is convenient to transfer TMA to UML. In this paper, we present the translation of TMA into a UMLbased process. The enterprise, information and task models of TMA are translated into UML models while preserving their original purpose. An important benefit of the process obtained is to provide guidelines for the elicitation of use cases and domain classes from the enterprise model.

REMM-Studio +: Modeling Variability to Enable Requirements Reuse

Requirements reuse has been recently pointed out as one of the most pressing needs and grand challenges in Requirements Engineering. To cope with this demand, this work presents a systematic requirements reuse approach in the Model-Driven Software Development context. The proposal revolves around REMM, a Requirements Engineering MetaModel, which has been recently extended to provide variability modeling mechanisms, which enable requirements reuse. The REMM-Studio+graphical modeling tool, built to support the new modeling capabilities of REMM, now enables the specification of both (1) catalogs of reusable requirements models (modeling for reuse), and (2) specific product requirements, by reusing previously defined requirements (modeling by reuse).