Priscila Engiel

Facing the challenges of teaching requirements engineering

This paper reports on our experience of teaching Requirements Engineering for undergraduate students. It is well known, the obstacles educators have in teaching requirements engineering. These obstacles are related to the very nature of requirements engineering: a multidisciplinary field that deals with both computer science and social sciences concepts. Teaching requirements engineering just with problems descriptions, as a basis for the construction of requirements specifications or requirements models, misses the point. Educators should also provide students with ways of gathering client information. However, to be effective in this regard, there is the need that students interact with clients. Our pedagogical strategy is designed to tackle these challenges. Notwithstanding, we need to have feedback about the strategy, which lead to the design of an assessment to gauge the efficacy of our pedagogical strategy. We, describe the strategy, stress its novelty in facing the challenges, and provide assessment results over 3 semesters.

Building Large Models of Law with NómosT

Laws and regulations impact the design of software systems, as they introduce new requirements and constrain existing ones. The analysis of a software system and the degree to which it complies with applicable laws can be greatly facilitated by models of applicable laws. However, laws are inherently voluminous, often consisting of hundreds of pages of text, and so are their models, consisting of thousands of concepts and relationships. This paper studies the possibility of building models of law semi-automatically by using the NomosT tool. Specifically, we present the NomosT architecture and the process by which a user constructs a model of law semi-automatically, by first annotating the text of a law and then generating from it a model. We then evaluate the performance of the tool relative to building a model of a piece of law manually. In addition, we offer statistics on the quality of the final output that suggest that tool supported generation of models of law reduces substantially human effort without affecting the quality of the output.

Is There a Demand of Software Transparency

This paper uses data about bills proposed to the Brazilian Congress to better understand transparency demand. The legislative process starts with bills, proposed by members of congress, which after the discussion on both chambers, may become a law. Webcitizen, a software company, offers to the Brazilian public an internet based software system with which people can vote on bills. This software interface is a site named Votenaweb, which gathers votes and publicize the results. As such, it aims to show how citizens value the proposed bills. Our study identifies bills related to transparency by using non-functional requirements (hereafter, NFRs) of the Transparency Softgoal Interdependency Graph (hereafter, SIG). Based on these results, we argue that there is a real future demand for software transparency, as advocated by previous work on software transparency.

Eliciting concepts from the Brazilian access law using a combined approach

Lately, organizations have been subject to regulation promoting information transparency; one example of this is the Brazilian Information Access Law. This paper presents a novel way of performing requirements elicitation using both the law and a Non-Functional Requirements Patterns catalog as the information sources. Since organizations must follow the law, its information systems must also implement the law as requirements. Our process is guided by pattern matching, text mining and grounded analysis. We examine the special case of the Brazilian Access Law using our approach, which compares a previously encoded transparency knowledge base with the law.

NómosT: Building large models of law with a tool-supported process

Abstract Laws and regulations impact the design of software systems, as they introduce new requirements and constrain existing ones. The analysis of a software system and the degree to which it complies with applicable laws can be greatly facilitated by models of applicable laws. However, laws are inherently voluminous, often consisting of hundreds of pages of text, and so are their models, consisting of thousands of concepts and relationships. This paper studies the possibility of building models of law semi-automatically by using the NomosT tool. Specifically, we present the NomosT architecture and the process by which a user constructs a model of law semi-automatically, by first annotating the text of a law and then generating from it a model. We then evaluate the performance of the tool relative to building a model of a fragment of law manually. In addition, we offer statistics on the quality of the final output that suggest that tool supported generation of models of law reduces substantially human effort without affecting the quality of the output.

A tool-supported compliance process for software systems

Laws and regulations impact the design of software systems, as they may introduce additional requirements and possible conflicts with pre-existing requirements. We propose a systematic, tool-supported process for establishing compliance of a software system with a given law. The process elicits new requirements from the law, compares them with existing ones and manages conflicts, exploiting a set of heuristics, partially supported by a tool. We illustrate our proposal through an exploratory study using the Italian Privacy Law. We also present results of a preliminary empirical study that indicates that adoption of the process improves compliance analysis for a simple compliance scenario.