Cristina Palomares

A Metamodel for Software Requirement Patterns

[Context and motivation] Software Requirement Patterns (SRP) are a type of artifact that may be used during requirements elicitation that also impact positively in other activities like documentation and validation. In our experiences, SRP show a great percentage of reuse for the non-functional requirements needed in call-for-tender requirement specifications. [Question / problem] We are facing the need of formulating the accurate definition of SRP for their use in call-for-tender processes to allow reasoning rigorously and know more about their semantics and applicability. [Principal ideas / results] In this paper we present a metamodel for SRP around three main concepts: 1) the structure of SRP themselves; 2) the relationships among them; 3) the classification criteria for grouping them. [Contribution] We provide a rigorous definition that shows the concepts that are of interest when defining and applying SRP.

A catalogue of functional software requirement patterns for the domain of content management systems

Software requirement patterns have been proposed as an artifact for fostering requirements reuse. When we define these patterns for the functional part of a software system, we realize that most of patterns are specific of a software domain. This paper presents and analyzes a catalogue of functional software requirement patterns for the domain of content management, and gives an overview of how this catalogue has been constructed from the systematic analysis of 6 existing software specification documents with the support of expert assessment.

PABRE-Man: Management of a requirement patterns catalogue

Software requirement patterns have been proposed as an artifact for fostering requirements reuse. In this paper we present PABRE-Man, a software subsystem aimed at managing a catalogue of patterns ready to be applied in requirements engineering projects.

A catalogue of non-technical Requirement Patterns

Software Requirement Patterns (SRP) have been proposed as an artifact for fostering requirements reuse. PABRE is a framework that promotes the use of SRP as a means for requirements elicitation, validation and documentation in the context of IT procurement projects. In this paper, we present a catalogue of non-technical SRP included in the framework and present in detail some of them. We also introduce the motivation to arrive to these patterns.

Constructing and Using Software Requirement Patterns

Software requirement reuse strategies are necessary to capitalize and reuse knowledge in the requirement engineering phase. The PABRE framework is designed to support requirement reuse through the use of software requirement patterns. It consists of a meta-model that describes the main concepts around the notion of pattern, a method to conduct the elicitation and documentation processes, a catalogue of patterns, and a tool that supports the catalogue’s management and use. In this chapter all these elements are presented in detail making emphasis on the construction, use and evolution of software requirement patterns. Furthermore, the chapter includes the construction of a catalogue of nontechnical software requirement patterns for illustration purposes.

Requirements reuse and requirement patterns: a state of the practice survey

Requirements engineering is a discipline with numerous challenges to overcome. One of these challenges is the implementation of requirements reuse approaches. Although several theoretical proposals exist, little is known about the practices that are currently adopted in industry. Our goal is to contribute to the investigation of the state of the practice in the reuse of requirements, eliciting current practices from practitioners, and their opinions whenever appropriate. Besides reuse in general, we focus on requirement patterns as a particular strategy to reuse. We conducted an exploratory survey based on an online questionnaire. We received 71 responses from requirements engineers with industrial experience in the field, which were analyzed in order to derive observations. Although we found that a high majority of respondents declared some level of reuse in their projects (in particular, non-functional requirements were identified as the most similar and recurrent among projects), it is true that only a minority of them declared such reuse as a regular practice. Larger IT organizations and IT organizations with well-established software processes and methods present higher levels of reuse. Ignorance of reuse techniques and processes is the main reason preventing wider adoption. From the different existing reuse techniques, the simplest ones based on textual copy and subsequent tailoring of former requirements are the most adopted techniques. However, participants who apply reuse more often tend to use more elaborate techniques. Opinions of respondents about the use of requirement patterns show that they can be expected to mitigate problems related to the quality of the resulting requirements, such as lack of uniformity, inconsistency, or ambiguity. The main reasons behind the lack of adoption of requirement patterns by practitioners (in spite of the increasing research approaches proposed in the community) are related to the lack of a well-defined reuse method and involvement of requirement engineers. The results of our paper are interesting for practitioners since we highlight relevant observations from the survey participants’ experiences when deciding to implement requirements reuse practices. We also suggest future lines of research based on the needs pointed out in the results.

PABRE-Proj: Applying patterns in requirements elicitation

Software requirement patterns have been proposed as a type of artifact for fostering requirements reuse. In this paper, we present PABRE-Proj a tool aimed at supporting requirements elicitation and specification.

Personal Recommendations in Requirements Engineering: The OpenReq Approach

[Context & motivation] Requirements Engineering (RE) is considered as one of the most critical phases in software development but still many challenges remain open. [Problem] Recommender systems have been applied to solve open RE challenges like requirements and stakeholder discovery; however, the existent proposals focus on specific RE tasks and do not give a general coverage for the RE process. [Principal ideas/results] In this research preview, we present the OpenReq approach to the development of intelligent recommendation and decision technologies that support different phases of RE in software projects. For doing so, the OpenReq approach will be formed by different parts that will be integrated in a process. Specifically, we present in this paper the OpenReq part for personal recommendations for stakeholders, which takes place during requirements elicitation, specification and analysis stages. [Contribution] OpenReq aims to improve and speed up RE processes, especially in large and distributed systems, by incorporating intelligent recommendation and decision technologies.

Reconciling Practice and Rigour in Ontology-Based Heterogeneous Information Systems Construction

Ontology integration addresses the problem of reconciling into one single semantic framework different knowledge chunks defined according to its own ontology. This field has been subject of analysis and many consolidated theoretical results are available. Still, in practice, ontology integration is difficult in heterogeneous information systems (HIS) that need to integrate assets already built and running which cannot be changed. Furthermore, in practice, the composed assets are usually not really defined according to an ontology but to a data model which is less rigorous but fit for the purpose of defining a data schema. In this paper, we propose a method for integrating assets participating in a HIS using a domain ontology, aimed at finding an optimal balance between semantic rigour and feasibility in terms of adoption in a real-world setting. The method proposes the use of data models describing the semantics of existing assets; their analysis in order to find commonalities and misalignments; the definition of the domain ontology, considering also other sources as standards, to express the main concepts in the HIS domain; the connection of the local models with this domain ontology; and its abstraction into a metamodel to facilitate further extensions. The method is an outcome of a collaborative software development project, OpenReq, aimed at delivering an ontology for requirements engineering (RE) designed to serve as baseline for the data model of an open platform offering methods and techniques to the RE community. The construction process of this ontology will be used to illustrate the method.

Natural Language Processing for Requirements Engineering: The Best Is Yet to Come

As part of the growing interest in natural language processing for requirements engineering (RE), RE researchers, computational linguists, and industry practitioners met at the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Requirements Engineering (NLP4RE 18). This article summarizes the workshop and presents an overview of the discussion held on the field’s future. This article is part of a theme issue on software engineering’s 50th anniversary.