Motoshi Saeki

Supporting Requirements Change Management in Goal Oriented Analysis

Requirements changes frequently occur at any time of a software development process and their management is a crucial issue to develop software of high quality. Meanwhile, recently goal-oriented analysis techniques are being put into practice to elicit requirements. In this situation, the change management of goal graphs and its support is necessary. This paper presents two topics related to change management of goal graphs; 1) version control of goal graphs and 2) impact analysis on a goal graph when its modifications occur. In our version control system, we extract the differences between successive versions of a goal graph by means of monitoring modification operations performed through a goal graph editor, and store them in a repository. Our impact analysis detects conflicts that arise when a new goal is added, and investigates the achievability of the other goals when the existing goal is deleted.

Supporting the Elicitation of Requirements Compliant with Regulations

This paper presents a technique to check the compliance of requirements with regulations while eliciting requirements. In our technique, we semantically represent a regulation with combinations of case frames resulting from Case Grammar technique. We match a newly elicited requirement sentence with the case frames of regulation sentences and then check if the requirements include the obligation acts specified by the matched regulation sentences and if they do not have prohibited acts. If we find that a requirement sentence does not follow the regulation, the addition or removal of the illegal acts included in the requirements are suggested.

A Tool for Attributed Goal-Oriented Requirements Analysis

his paper presents an integrated supporting tool for Attributed Goal-Oriented Requirements Analysis (AGORA), which is an extended version of goal-oriented analysis. Our tool assists seamlessly requirements analysts and stakeholders in their activities throughout AGORA steps including constructing goal graphs with group work, prioritizing goals, and version control of goal graphs.

A Supporting Tool for Requirements Elicitation Using a Domain Ontology

Since requirements analysts do not have sufficient knowledge on a problem domain, i.e. domain knowledge, the technique how to make up for lacks of domain knowledge is a key issue. This paper proposes the usage of a domain ontology as domain knowledge during requirements elicitation processes and a supporting tool based on this technique. In addition, we had several experiments to show the usefulness of our tool.

Enhancing Domain Knowledge for Requirements Elicitation with Web Mining

To elicit software requirements, we have to have knowledge about a problem domain, e.g., healthcare, shopping or banking where the software is applied. A description of domain knowledge such as a domain ontology helps requirements analysts to elicit requirements completely and correctly to some extent even if they do not have such knowledge sufficiently. Several requirements elicitation methods and tools using domain knowledge description have been thus proposed, but how to develop and to enhance such description is rarely discussed. Summarizing existing documents related to the domain is one of the typical ways to develop such description, and an interview to domain experts is another typical way. However, requirements cannot be elicited completely only with such domain-specific knowledge because a user of such knowledge, i.e., a requirements analyst is not a domain expert in general. Requirements could be also elicited more correctly with both specific and general knowledge because general knowledge sometimes improves understandings of analysts about domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we propose a method and a tool to enhance an ontology of domain knowledge for requirements elicitation by using Web mining. In our method and our tool, a domain ontology consists of concepts and their relationships. Our method and tool helps an analyst with a domain ontology to mine general concepts necessary for his requirements elicitation from documents on Web and to add such concepts to the ontology. We confirmed enhanced ontologies contribute to improving the completeness and correctness of elicited requirements through a comparative experiment.

Process Improvement in Requirements Management: A Method Engineering Approach

Method Engineering and Requirements Engineering are two research fields that can benefit from another. To increase process maturity in systems development, we propose an approach for incremental method evolution that combines capability-based and problem-based methods. With this method, we can assemble new methods, based on the process need of an organization. We show how this approach can be implemented using Computer Aided Method Engineering (CAME) technology. In addition, we demonstrate the utility of the Product Software Knowledge Infrastructure by showing an example of the insertion of cost-value prioritization as a method increment in software product management. This shows how isolated innovations in the Requirements Engineering domain can be embedded in software development practices.

Security Requirements Elicitation Using Method Weaving and Common Criteria

The elicitation of security requirements (SRs) is a crucial issue to develop secure information systems of high quality. Although we have several requirements elicitation methods, most of them do not provide sufficient supports to identify security threats, security objectives and security functions. Security functions are closely related to architectural design of the information system, i.e. solution space, and knowledge from the solution space is necessary to elicit appropriate SRs of higher quality. This paper proposes the usage of Common Criteria and related knowledge sources to identify SRs from functional requirements through eliciting threats and security objectives. Our proposed technique is to weave through Common Criteria two types of elicitation methods; one is any existing functional requirements elicitation method and the other is a typical method for eliciting security functional requirements so that we can have a powerful method.

Semantic Requirements Engineering

Requirements engineering (RE) techniques play a crucial role in information systems development processes. There are many excellent techniques of RE to assist requirements analysts and stakeholders in producing requirements specification of higher quality, and some of them are put into practice in industry. However, one of the issues of these RE techniques is that they do not handle semantic aspects of requirements. If we can deal with the meaning of requirements by using automated techniques, we can get more effective RE techniques to produce requirements specifications of higher quality. In this chapter, we consider an ontology as a semantic domain so as to provide the meaning for requirements, and discuss the potentials of the RE techniques using an ontology as a semantic basis. Especially, we illustrate an extension of goal-oriented requirements analysis where this idea is embedded, i.e. we provide the semantics for goal descriptions written in natural language using a mapping from them to an ontology. The inference mechanisms of the ontology allow us to decompose a goal into sub-goals and to find missing goals. Furthermore, in this chapter we discuss the possibilities of the techniques to support the other activities of RE processes using this ontological technique, e.g. measuring quality metrics and controlling versions of requirements from a semantic view. Due to similarity to Semantic Web techniques, we call a family of these engineering techniques Semantic Requirements Engineering in this chapter.

Attributed Goal-Oriented Analysis Method for Selecting Alternatives of Software Requirements

During software requirements analysis, developers and stakeholders have many alternatives of requirements to be achieved and should make decisions to select an alternative out of them. There are two significant points to be considered for supporting these decision making processes in requirements analysis; 1) dependencies among alternatives and 2) evaluation based on multi-criteria and their trade-off. This paper proposes the technique to address the above two issues by using an extended version of goal-oriented analysis. In goal-oriented analysis, elicited goals and their dependencies are represented with an AND-OR acyclic directed graph. We use this technique to model the dependencies of the alternatives. Furthermore we associate attribute values and their propagation rules with nodes and edges in a goal graph in order to evaluate the alternatives with them. The attributes and their calculation rules greatly depend on the characteristics of a development project. Thus, in our approach, we select and use the attributes and their rules that can be appropriate for the project. TOPSIS method is adopted to show alternatives and their resulting attribute values.

Checking Regulatory Compliance of Business Processes and Information Systems

In these years, many laws and regulations are being enacted to prevent business processes (BPs) and information systems (ISs) from their malicious users. As a result, it is significant for organizations to ensure that their BPs and ISs comply with these regulations. This paper proposes a technique to apply a formal technique to ensure the regulatory compliance of BP or IS descriptions written in use case models. We translate the use case models of the behavior of BPs and ISs into finite state transition machines. Regulations are represented with computational tree logic (CTL) and their satisfiability are automatically verified using a model checker SMV. The modality of regulations can be specified with temporal operators based on branching time semantics of the CTL in our technique.