Padmalata V. Nistala

An Approach to Understand and Elicit Requirements using Systemic Models: Ensuring a Connect from Problem Context to Requirements

Abstract The context in which Businesses operate today is becoming increasingly complex. This is due to the influence of the various factors such as societal, political, economical, regulatory, cultural, and technological on the business. For IT organizations focusing on next generation systems, the ability to understand and cope with this complexity is needed to elicit correct business requirements to build effective solutions. Research studies have highlighted “requirements creep and gaps” to be a major cause of many software systems problems. The inability to comprehend these business systems leads to a lot of rework at later stages including shelving of the projects in some scenarios. Research carried out in our lab to address this problem, led to the design of an approach that begins with the big picture understanding of the business, identifies suitable business objectives which are traced to business processes for realization and elicits corresponding requirements. It comprises multiple models which include a qualitative cybernetic model to understand the context with all its influences and a stakeholder model to derive the business objectives based on stakeholder perspective. The paper outlines the approach encapsulated in a methodology to establish connect from the business context to the elicited requirements for solution development along with a case illustration.

Establishing content traceability for software applications: An approach based on structuring and tracking of configuration elements

Establishing content traceability between various software artifacts or configuration elements at granular level and identifying the gaps in traceability at each phase is a key challenge in software development. In other disciplines such as manufacturing and systems engineering we can find models, well established principles and practices for formulating and tracing the product parts and composition. This paper extends the system model and product breakdown structure concepts from these disciplines to software systems. We propose a model that provides a granular view of software product composition and content traceability through structured relationships among various software configuration elements. Here, we define the key configuration elements essential for the alignment and traceability, create a structure through interconnected relationships of these elements at each phase and analyze the inconsistencies in the relationship. The model provides a visual representation to understand the completeness at each of the development stages. The content traceability is established from both completeness and correctness perspectives and gaps are identified at each phase. The paper briefly describes the model and initial results from pilot implementation in an industry application.

An approach to carry out consistency analysis on requirements: Validating and tracking requirements through a configuration structure

Requirements management and traceability have always been one of grand challenges in software development area. Studies reveal that 30-40% of software defects can be traced to gaps or errors in requirements Although several models and techniques have been defined to optimize the requirements process, ensuring alignment and consistency of elicited requirements continues to be a challenge. All software engineering standards and methodologies recognize the importance of maintaining relationships among the software elements for traceability. We have leveraged the structured relationships among the requirement elements to come up with an approach to systematically carry out consistency analysis of requirements for software systems. The framework has multiple models: a multi layered requirement model, a configuration structure to link and track the requirement items, a consistency analysis method to identify the inconsistencies in the requirements and a consistency index computation to indicate the level of consistency in overall requirements of the software system. This approach helps to validate the requirements from both completeness and correctness perspectives and also check their consistency in forward and backward directions. The paper outlines the framework, describes the encompassing models and the implementation details from pilot of the framework to an industry case study along with results.

Quality management and Software Product Quality Engineering

The increased complexity and scale of software systems presents difficult challenges in design, development, and asserting software quality. Software organizations which develop and maintain software systems on an industrial scale, have huge challenges in addressing software product quality concerns in terms of identifying a comprehensive set of software quality requirements and ways to achieve them in spite of adoption to industry standard quality systems and processes. In this chapter, a product quality engineering approach has been proposed to assert software quality by connecting the generic software processes defined at the organization level to specific product quality concerns through quality engineering techniques. This chapter outlines the approach through a set of principles, wherein each principle focuses on systematic achievement of a specific quality engineering concern and contributes to the quality assurance of software systems in a consistent manner.

A cybernetics model for managing innovations a case instance of an IT innovation

IT service organizations depend on innovations to remain competitive, attract new markets and customers, and constantly improve the service delivery process. Typical innovation management life cycle in these organizations involves initial conception of the idea, proof of concept validation, extending it to the larger organization for scale up and realization of benefits. The inherent variety and complexity of these organizational structures and environment involving spread across multiple business domains, technologies, thousands of projects and millions of associates, throws up huge challenges for creating and diffusing innovations. The science of cybernetics can effectively be employed to manage innovation process in such complex organizational setup. The cybernetic character is evident in the complete lifecycle of innovation management. At every stage of the process, the innovation may need to be course-corrected based on feedback. This paper explores the cybernetics involved in the innovation life cycle. A cybernetic model for the managing innovations is proposed. The principles of cybernetics such as feedback, optimality, and requisite variety are leveraged in the model and illustrated with a case study of large scale IT industry process innovation.

An Attempt at Explicating the Relationship between Knowledge, Systems and Engineering

Software systems often serve as the agents of operation for both enterprise systems and embedded systems. Engineering such systems is a knowledge-centric activity. A clear understanding of the relationship between knowledge, systems and engineering can help us to establish firm theoretical foundations for software and systems engineering. Currently we have a strong intuitive understanding of how knowledge flows into engineering, while our understanding of the relationship between systems and knowledge is part explicit and part tacit. A symptom of this is that we have difficulty in building unified models of large systems such as telescopes and enterprises that span multiple knowledge domains and viewpoints. We are able to build multiple models covering various aspects and particular viewpoints. However, we have challenges in integrating them into a single unified model. Another symptom is that software and systems engineering practice are widely viewed as empirical fields, without sufficiently strong theoretical foundations. This work attempts to explicate and synthesize our common intuitive understanding in this space to develop a conceptual model of the relationships. It then explores the validity of this model by examining the extent to which it is able to explain and illuminate current engineering practices and issues. This is an initial strawman version of the model, presented with a view to obtaining feedback and inputs from the community.

Patterns for Interactive Line Charts on Mobile Devices

Mobile devices are gaining prominence for a variety of activities. From casual browsing to complex tasks like online shopping and banking, people have started using mobiles for almost everything previously done on a desktop. As more and more tasks are shifting towards mobiles, it has become crucial to redesign desktop elements to fit and function consistently on mobile devices as well. One such element is data visualization. The process of designing visualizations for desktops is fairly matured; however, when it comes to mobile devices there are still a number of challenges faced. Most of these challenges revolve around the limited screen space and fewer conventional mediums of interactions offered by these devices. This paper presents a set of design patterns that help overcome some of the challenges faced when designing data visualizations. These patterns are designed for line charts on mobile devices. However, some of them might apply to other kinds of charts as well. There are four patterns presented in this paper, namely details slider, legend filter, selection brush, and responsive data grid. These patterns can be used either individually or together to help make visualizations more convenient to use on mobile devices.

A Process Framework for Product Quality Achievement

In current software engineering practice, there is generally a rather limited connection between software processes and product quality, because the processes are defined at a level of abstraction above the specific product being delivered. This tutorial shows how that connection can be strengthened through the introduction of product-specific processes that identify and capture the collection of tasks needed to produce the specific product. It presents a process framework for product quality achievement that has recently been published as ISO/IEC TS 30103, and implemented successfully on several projects at an IT service organization. The key ideas include establishment of quality specifications for each configuration item, instantiating the organizational processes to the particular product context based on the targeted quality attributes using institutional knowledge, and tracking consistency relationships among project artifacts as concurrent development proceeds. The framework is likely to be of particular interest to project organizations that operate in multiple domains, where there is significant variation in quality goals and the techniques required to achieve quality.

Process patterns for requirement consistency analysis

In the requirement space, patterns are gaining prominence to capture the requirement knowledge for reuse and help identify requirements. The quality of requirement specification is critical for effective understanding and implementation of requirements. This paper presents a set of process patterns that use the concept of compositional traceability to analyze how well the requirement specifications or user stories have been formulated and to identify inconsistencies among its encompassing elements. We present two patterns that have been successfully applied and found useful to carry out consistency analysis on requirements and detect inconsistencies in requirements: Requirements coverage analysis and Requirements traceability analysis. These patterns can be applied to projects during requirements phase for review and analysis of stated requirements. The paper describes the patterns, discusses its implementation and results from a project case study.

Quality management and software process engineering

Assurance of software quality has been supported by evolving testing practices and technologies surrounding it. Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) on the other hand has prescribed processes and managerial practices for software development as a whole contributing to managerial practices with respect to quality assurance. However these practices do not provide guidance on engineering the software process (including all stages in software life cycle) so that people playing different roles in the process are aware of their contribution to software quality and assuring it through related activities and design. In this book chapter, we present an approach to engineer software process to assure software quality. Before we describe the approach, we present our notion of processes which forms basis for the approach.