Jennifer Horkoff

Goal-oriented requirements engineering: an extended systematic mapping study

Abstract Over the last two decades, much attention has been paid to the area of goal-oriented requirements engineering (GORE), where goals are used as a useful conceptualization to elicit, model, and analyze requirements, capturing alternatives and conflicts. Goal modeling has been adapted and applied to many sub-topics within requirements engineering (RE) and beyond, such as agent orientation, aspect orientation, business intelligence, model-driven development, and security. Despite extensive efforts in this field, the RE community lacks a recent, general systematic literature review of the area. In this work, we present a systematic mapping study, covering the 246 top-cited GORE-related conference and journal papers, according to Scopus. Our literature map addresses several research questions: we classify the types of papers (e.g., proposals, formalizations, meta-studies), look at the presence of evaluation, the topics covered (e.g., security, agents, scenarios), frameworks used, venues, citations, author networks, and overall publication numbers. For most questions, we evaluate trends over time. Our findings show a proliferation of papers with new ideas and few citations, with a small number of authors and papers dominating citations; however, there is a slight rise in papers which build upon past work (implementations, integrations, and extensions). We see a rise in papers concerning adaptation/variability/evolution and a slight rise in case studies. Overall, interest in GORE has increased. We use our analysis results to make recommendations concerning future GORE research and make our data publicly available.

Quality Requirements in Agile as a Knowledge Management Problem: More than Just-in-Time

Just-in-time (JIT) approaches have been suggested for managing non-functional requirements in agile projects. However, many non-functional requirements cannot be raised and met on the spot. In this position paper, we argue that effective JIT engineering of quality requirements depends on a solid foundation of long-term knowledge about all relevant quality requirements. We present two examples from projects related to safety and security and show that not all aspects of these quality requirements can be invented and changed just in time. Further, managing, for example, operationalization of quality requirements just in time depends on sufficient understanding of (i) customer value and (ii) the system under construction that must be shared by the engineering team. If a Learning Software Organization (LSO) intends to increase agility and speed up system development, it needs a holistic concept for managing this knowledge. We propose that a knowledge-management framework can facilitate JIT-RE by structuring, representing, and allowing updates of long-term knowledge about quality requirements. Such a knowledge-management framework should allow to map user value to system requirements and have important properties to allow JIT RE and sustainable evolution.

Goals, Workflow, and Value: Case Study Experiences with Three Modeling Frameworks

It is beneficial to understand the benefits and drawbacks of enterprise modeling approaches in certain contexts. We report experiences applying different combinations of three modeling approaches to industrial cases. Specifically, we report on experiences from four companies using a combination of goal modeling, e3 value modeling, and workflow modeling. Our findings help to guide enterprise modeling approach selection in similar contexts, and can be used to make recommendations to improve future applications of the selected modeling approaches.

Challenges of Aligning Requirements Engineering and System Testing in Large-Scale Agile: A Multiple Case Study

As agile methods become more pervasive, agile practices are applied to more large-scale systems with a scope that goes beyond pure software. The expansion of agile in these contexts provides benefits, but creates new challenges. Widespread use of agile has changed the way we must think about practices both in Requirements Engineering (RE) and in System Testing (ST). Our experience shows that many challenges in the application of large-scale agile development relate to either RE or ST, and in particular to the alignment between these areas. In this paper we present large-scale agile-related challenges from a multiple case study which relate to REST alignment. We map our challenges to an existing framework for REST alignment, and make an initial attempt to suggest agile RE practices from the literature which may alleviate these challenges. Our results show that the interviewed companies need to first adopt more agile RE practices to enhance REST alignment and then leverage agile testing. Future work will look more towards evaluating these best practices.

Emerging Perspectives of API Strategy [Unedited]

Software specialists increasingly find themselves in situations where their API-related decisions have strong implications on software business. Through long-lasting research collaboration with API-responsible software specialists and several large software-intensive companies, we have established a strategic API framework to aid in consideration of business concerns when designing, updating, or maintaining APIs. We provide the following actionable insights in this article: 1) our framework combines multiple layers and perspectives that provided value for our partners in their in API design, 2) the framework helps API designers to better organize their design decisions amongst various business and technical concerns and 3) the framework supports development of holistic API strategies, as it supports: APIs as objects of digital innovation, allowing to derive important boundary objects; BAPO perspective on API development; and consideration of API governance. We use anonymized examples from our partners to illustrate the application of the framework.

Experiences Applying \(\hbox {e}^{3}\) Value Modeling in a Cross-Company Study

Driven by business interests, (product/customer) value has become a critical topic in system and software engineering as well as enterprise planning. The conceptual modeling community has responded to this challenge with several modeling approaches, including e3 value modeling, focusing on capturing and analyzing value flows in value networks. This modeling approach has risen from practical e-commerce experiences and has been further studied in an academic context. In this experience paper, we report the advantages and disadvantages of applying e3 value modeling as part of a cross-company case study focusing on understanding the internal and external value of APIs from a strategic perspective. We found that value modeling was generally well-received and understood by the company representatives, but also found drawbacks when used in our context, including challenges in modeling internal value networks, capturing problematic or missing values, finding quantitative value measures, and showing underlying motivations for flows. Our findings can help to improve language aspects, methods and tools, and can help to guide future value analysis in similar contexts.

Involving External Stakeholders in Project Courses

Problem: The involvement of external stakeholders in capstone projects and project courses is desirable due to its potential positive effects on the students. Capstone projects particularly profit from the inclusion of an industrial partner to make the project relevant and help students acquire professional skills. In addition, an increasing push towards education that is aligned with industry and incorporates industrial partners can be observed. However, the involvement of external stakeholders in teaching moments can create friction and could, in the worst case, lead to frustration of all involved parties.n Contribution: We developed a model that allows analysing the involvement of external stakeholders in university courses both in a retrospective fashion, to gain insights from past course instances, and in a constructive fashion, to plan the involvement of external stakeholders.n Key Concepts: The conceptual model and the accompanying guideline guide the teachers in their analysis of stakeholder involvement. The model is comprised of several activities (define, execute, and evaluate the collaboration). The guideline provides questions that the teachers should answer for each of these activities. In the constructive use, the model allows teachers to define an action plan based on an analysis of potential stakeholders and the pedagogical objectives. In the retrospective use, the model allows teachers to identify issues that appeared during the project and their underlying causes. Drawing from ideas of the reflective practitioner, the model contains an emphasis on reflection and interpretation of the observations made by the teacher and other groups involved in the courses.n Key Lessons: Applying the model retrospectively to a total of eight courses shows that it is possible to reveal hitherto implicit risks and assumptions and to gain a better insight into the interaction between external stakeholders and students. Our empirical data reveals seven recurring risk themes that categorise the different risks appearing in the analysed courses. These themes can also be used to categorise mitigation strategies to address these risks proactively. Additionally, aspects not related to external stakeholders, e.g., about the interaction of the project with other courses in the study programme, have been revealed. The constructive use of the model for one course has proved helpful in identifying action alternatives and finally deciding to not include external stakeholders in the project due to the perceived cost-benefit-ratio.n Implications to Practice: Our evaluation shows that the model is a viable and useful tool that allows teachers to reason about and plan the involvement of external stakeholders in a variety of course settings, and in particular in capstone projects.

Interview with Anne Persson on “The Practice of Enterprise Modeling”

We conducted the interview iteratively via email correspondence over the summer of 2017. Anne had been the general chair of PoEM 2017 in Skovde 2016 and, given her history with PoEM, we thus were v ...