Nacereddine Zarour

AspeCis: an aspect-oriented approach to develop a cooperative information system

It is difficult for a single Information System (IS) to accomplish a complex task. One solution is to look for help of other ISs and make them cooperate, leading to so-called Cooperative Information System (CIS). So Information Systems cooperation is an active ongoing area of research in the field of information systems, where reuse is an important issue. Besides, the aspect paradigm is a promising avenue for reuse. Thus, we argue that it is interesting to propose an aspect approach to build a new information system capable to accomplish complex tasks based on the reuse of systems artifacts previously developed. According to our best of knowledge few works have tackled this question. In this paper, we present an aspect-oriented approach called AspeCis, applied from the requirements until the development phases, in order to develop a CIS from existing ISs by using their artifacts such as requirements, architectures and design.

A Novel Approach to Change Management in Requirements Engineering Context

Requirements change management RCM is actually an inevitable task that might be considered in system developments life cycle, since user requirements are continuously evolving some are added, others are modified or deleted. A large majority of studies have examined the issue of change, while most of them focused on the design and source code, requirements were often forgotten, even though, the cost of fixing the defect and introduced error due to the requirements is less higher compared to the cost of error in design and implementation. For this purpose, this work focuses on change issues in the requirements engineering RE context, which contains the complete initial specification. Properties such as adaptability, perception, and cooperation of the multi-agent system MAS allow managing changing requirements in a controlled manner. The main objective of this work is to develop an agent-oriented approach which will be effective in the requirements management to be adapted to changes in their environments.

Prioritizing Non-functional Concerns in MAMIE Methodology

The increasing globalization of markets and companies demands more and more investigations of distributed requirements engineering. Requirements elicitation is organized as one of the most critical activities of the requirements engineering process. It is a difficult task enough when done locally, but it is even more difficult in a distributed environment due to cultural, language and time zone boundaries. In our previous research we have proposed a methodology to elicit requirements for an inter-company co-operative information system. In this methodology the analyst must specify a priority value for each non-functional concern that may be considered in the inter-company co-operation process. To do, s/he must take in consideration several viewpoints of concerned stakeholders. In order to help the analyst to better accomplish this task, we propose in the present paper a process based on Grunig and Hunt model to identify concerned stakeholders and Michell et al model to prioritize them. A mathematical function proposed to return the final non-functional concern priority constitutes a cornerstone of this process. Preliminary results suggest that this process is of valuable help to analysts during requirements elicitation.

A multi-criteria process to resolve conflict in the composition of aspectual requirements

The requirements composition is an important activity in Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering (AORE). This activity is used to define functionalities of the future system. It consists of the composition of aspectual requirements with base requirements. This composition may raise conflicting situations between aspectual requirements. However, a conflict appear when two or more aspectual requirements (aspect) that contribute negatively to each other and have the same degree of importance must to be composed together to define functionalities of the future system. This conflict need to be identified and resolved. In this paper, we propose a multi-criteria process to resolve conflicts in the context of AORE. This process use fuzzy measure and Choquet integral to take into account the interaction between these criteria when they are not mutually independent.