Massila Kamalrudin

Improving requirements quality using essential use case interaction patterns

Requirements specifications need to be checked against the 3Cs - Consistency, Completeness and Correctness - in order to achieve high quality. This is especially difficult when working with both natural language requirements and associated semi-formal modelling representations. We describe a technique and support tool that allows us to perform semi-automated checking of natural language and semi-formal requirements models, supporting both consistency management between representations but also correctness and completeness analysis. We use a concept of essential use case interaction patterns to perform the correctness and completeness analysis on the semi-formal representation. We highlight potential inconsistencies, incompleteness and incorrectness using visual differencing in our support tool. We have evaluated our approach via an end user study which focused on the tools usefulness, ease of use, ease of learning and user satisfaction and provided data for cognitive dimensions of notations analysis of the tool.

Generating essential user interface prototypes to validate requirements

Requirements need to be validated at an early stage of analysis to address inconsistency and incompleteness issues. Capturing requirements usually involves natural language analysis, which is often imprecise and error prone, or translation into formal models, which are difficult for non-technical stakeholders to understand and use. Users often best understand proposed software systems from the likely user interface they will present. To this end we describe novel automated tool support for capturing requirements as Essential Use Cases and translating these into “Essential User Interface” low-fidelity rapid prototypes. We describe our automated tool supporting requirements capture, lo-fi user interface prototype generation and consistency management.

Managing Consistency between Textual Requirements, Abstract Interactions and Essential Use Cases

Consistency checking needs to be done from the earliest phase of requirements capture as requirements captured by requirement engineers are often vague, error-prone and inconsistent with users’ needs. To improve such consistency checking we have applied a traceability approach with visualization capability. We have embedded this into a light-weight automated tracing tool in order to allow users to capture their requirements and generate Essential Use Case models of these requirements automatically. Our tool supports inconsistency checking between textual requirements, abstract interactions that derive from the text and Essential Use Case models. A preliminary evaluation has been conducted with target end users and the tool usefulness and ease of use are evaluated. We describe our motivation for this research, our prototype tool and results of our evaluation.

Automated Software Tool Support for Checking the Inconsistency of Requirements

Handling inconsistency in software requirements is a complicated task which has attracted the interest of many groups of researchers. Formal and semi-formal specifications often have inconsistencies in the depicted requirements that need to be managed and resolved. This is particularly challenging when refining informal to formalized requirements. We propose an automated tool with traceability and consistency checking techniques to support analysis of requirements and traceability between different representations: textual, visual, informal and formal.

Automatic acceptance test case generation from essential use cases

Requirements validation is a crucial process to determine whether client-stakeholders’ needs and expectations of a product are sufficiently correct and complete. Various requirements validation techniques have been used to evaluate the correctness and quality of requirements, but most of these techniques are tedious, expensive and time consuming. Accordingly, most project members are reluctant to invest their time and efforts in the requirements validation process.Moreover, automated tool supports that promote effective collaboration between the client-stakeholders and the engineers are still lacking. In this paper, we describe a novel approach that combines prototyping and test-based requirements techniques to improve the requirements validation process and promote better communication and collaboration between requirements engineers and clientstakeholders. To justify the potential of this prototype tool, we also present three types of evaluation conducted on the prototpye tool, which are the usability survey, 3-tool comparison analysis and expert reviews.

Capturing security requirements using essential use cases (EUCs)

Capturing security requirements is a complex process, but it is crucial to the success of a secure software product. Hence, requirements engineers need to have security knowledge when eliciting and analyzing the security requirements from business requirements. However, the majority of requirements engineers lack such knowledge and skills, and they face difficulties to capture and understand many security terms and issues. This results in capturing inaccurate, inconsistent and incomplete security requirements that in turn may lead to insecure software systems. In this paper, we describe a new approach of capturing security requirements using an extended Essential Use Cases (EUCs) model. This approach enhances the process of capturing and analyzing security requirements to produce accurate and complete requirements. We have evaluated our prototype tool using usability testing and assessment of the quality of our generated EUC security patterns by security engineering experts.

Supporting requirements modelling in the Malay language using essential use cases

Requirements are typically modelled in natural language, leading to inconsistencies, incompleteness and incorrectness due to inherent natural language ambiguities and lack of precise modelling rules. In previous work, we developed a technique and toolset to support extraction of requirements from English text and supporting semi-formal modelling and roundtrip refinement using Essential use cases, helping to mitigate some of these problems. In this paper we describe new work applying this human-centric approach to requirements engineering to the Malay language. We describe an extension of our original Essential Use Cases toolset to support requirements modelling in the Malay language essential interaction modelling, and results of a preliminary experiment to gauge our tools effectiveness in supporting Malay natural language extraction and round-trip requirements refinement.

MaramaAI: Automated and Visual Approach for Inconsistency Checking of Requirements

Requirements are commonly vague and ambiguous. In this paper, we describe an automated Inconsistency Checker called MaramaAI for checking for high-level inconsistency between textual requirements, abstract interactions and Essential Use Cases. We use concepts of phrase extraction and essential interaction patterns to carry out these checks. We provide further support for checking of requirements quality attributes such as completeness and correctness using visual differencing.

A review on tool supports for security requirements engineering

Capturing the right security requirements is crucial when developing a security software. Poor elicited security requirements can lead to a failure in software development, thus it needs to be accurately defined. This study evaluates various security requirement engineering tools and analyses the existing gaps in security requirement engineering tools. Based on a literature search conducted manually, we report our findings from the review and analysis of different studies of security requirements engineering tool. Consequently, the gaps and motivations found from this literature study are discussed. Future directions of this study is to develop a more useful tool that can perform a better function in capturing security requirements are also discussed.

MaramaAIC: tool support for consistency management and validation of requirements

Requirements captured by requirements engineers (REs) are commonly inconsistent with their client’s intended requirements and are often error prone. There is limited tool support providing end-to-end support between the REs and their client for the validation and improvement of these requirements. We have developed an automated tool called MaramaAIC (Automated Inconsistency Checker) to address these problems. MaramaAIC provides automated requirements traceability and visual support to identify and highlight inconsistency, incorrectness and incompleteness in captured requirements. MaramaAIC provides an end-to-end rapid prototyping approach together with a patterns library that helps to capture requirements and check the consistency of requirements that have been expressed in textual natural language requirements and then extracted to semi-formal abstract interactions, essential use cases (EUCs) and user interface prototype models. It helps engineers to validate the correctness and completeness of the EUCs modelled requirements by comparing them to “best-practice” templates and generates an abstract prototype in the form of essential user interface prototype models and concrete User Interface views in the form of HTML. We describe its design and implementation together with results of evaluating our tool’s efficacy and performance, and user perception of the tool’s usability and its strengths and weaknesses via a substantial usability study. We also present a qualitative study on the effectiveness of the tool’s end-to-end rapid prototyping approach in improving dialogue between the RE and the client as well as improving the quality of the requirements.