Collaborative cyber-physical systems are capable of forming networks at runtime to achieve goals that are unachievable for individual systems. They do so by connecting to each other and exchanging information that helps them coordinate their behaviors to achieve shared goals. Their highly complex dependencies, however, are difficult to document using traditional goal modeling approaches. To help developers

With the rise in initiatives such as software ecosystems and Internet of Things (IoT), developing web Application Programming Interfaces (web APIs) has become an increasingly common practice. One main concern in developing web APIs is that they expose back-end systems and data toward clients. This exposure threatens critical non-functional requirements, such as the security of back-end systems, the

Bridging the gap between academia and industry is an important issue to promote the practicality of i* framework. Researchers have been dealing with this issue from various perspectives, such as simplifying the meta-models or modeling processes of i* framework. In this paper, we exclusively focus on the scalability issue in laying out large-scale i* models and propose a two-level layout approach to

Requirements engineering remains a discipline that is faced with a large number of challenges, including the implementation of a requirements elicitation process in industry. Although several proposals have been suggested by researchers and academics, little is known of the practices that are actually followed in industry. Our objective is to investigate the state-of-practice with respect to requirements

Implementing machine learning in an enterprise involves tackling a wide range of complexities with respect to requirements elicitation, design, development, and deployment of such solutions. Despite the necessity and relevance of requirements engineering approaches to the process, not much research has been done in this area. This paper employs a case study method to evaluate the expressiveness and

Requirements selection is a decision-making process that enables project managers to focus on the deliverables that add most value to the project outcome. This task is performed to define which features or requirements will be developed in the next release. It is a complex multi-criteria decision process that has been focused by many research works, because a balance between business profits and investment

Nowadays, the growing importance of modelling in software engineering is without a doubt reinforced by the blossoming of model-driven architecture (MDA). In this trend, MDA could be considered the most convenient approach to integrate the modelling process in data warehousing projects. On the other hand, decision-makers are usually unable to express their business needs in a concise way that allows

Defects in requirement specifications can have severe consequences during the software development life cycle. Some of them may result in poor product quality and/or time and budget overrun due to incorrect or missing quality characteristics, such as security. This characteristic requires special attention in web applications because they have become a target for manipulating sensible data. Several

Integrating novel software systems in our society, economy and environment can have far-reaching effects. As a result, software systems should be designed in such a way as to maintain or improve the sustainability of their intended socio-technical systems. However, a paradigm shift is required to raise awareness of software professionals on the potential sustainability effects of software systems.

Industry 4.0 is expected to deliver significant productivity gain taking advantage of Internet of things (IoT). Smart solutions, enhanced by IoT, are constantly driving revolutionary approaches in multiple domains. Smart factories are one domain where intelligent integrated robotic systems will revolutionize manufacturing, resulting in a complex ecosystem, where humans, robots and machinery are combined

Urban environments are urgently required to become smarter to overcome sustainability and resilience challenges whilst remaining economically viable. This involves a vast increase in the penetration of ICT resources, both physical and virtual, with the requirement to factor in built environment, socio-economic and human artefacts. This paper, therefore, proposes a methodology for eliciting, testing

Among the variety of the available requirements elicitation techniques, interviews are the most commonly used. Performing effective interviews is challenging, especially for students and novice analysts, since interviews’ success depends largely on soft skills and experience. Despite their diffusion and their challenging nature, when it comes to requirements engineering education and training (REET)

Software systems are becoming increasingly complex. Their ubiquitous presence makes users more dependent on their correctness in many aspects of daily life. As a result, there is a growing need to make software systems and their decisions more comprehensible, with more transparency in software-based decision making. Transparency is therefore becoming increasingly important as a non-functional requirement

Modeling of natural language requirements, especially for a large system, can take a significant amount of effort and time. Many automated model-driven approaches partially address this problem. However, the application of state-of-the-art neural network architectures to automated model element identification tasks has not been studied. In this paper, we perform an empirical study on automatic model

The design of data warehouses (DWs) is based on both their data sources and users’ requirements. The more closely the DW multidimensional schema reflects the stakeholders’ needs, the more effectively they will make use of the DW content for their OLAP analyses. Thus, considerable attention has been given in the literature to DW requirements analysis, including requirements elicitation, specification

The research in this paper adds to the discussion linked to the challenge of capturing and modeling tacit knowledge throughout software development projects. The issue emerged when modeling functional requirements during a project for a client. However, using the design science research methodology at a particular point in the project helped to create an artifact, a functional requirements modeling

Telos is a conceptual modeling language intended to capture software knowledge, such as software system requirements, domain knowledge, architectures, design decisions and more. To accomplish this, Telos was designed to be extensible in the sense that the concepts used to capture software knowledge can be defined in the language itself, instead of being built-in. This extensibility is accomplished

The article “Modular norm models: practical representation and analysis of contractual rights and obligations.

In incremental software development approaches, the product is developed in various releases. In each release, a set of requirements is proposed for the development. Usually, due to lack of funds, lack of time and dependency between requirements, there is no possibility to develop all the required requirements. There are two conflicting objectives for choosing an optimal subset of the requirements:

Requirements engineering (RE) involves the critical activities required to capture customers’ requirements/needs accurately. RE is a communication-intensive activity. As culture plays a major role in the way individuals communicate and perform a task, RE activities might be strongly influenced by individuals’ cultures. However, there are very few published works on this issue. The goal of this study

Testing a software system is an important step approach to ensuring quality, safety, and reliability in safety-critical systems (SCS). Several authors have published new approaches to improve the processes of testing safety requirements taking into consideration existing processes that seek to improve techniques and contribute positively with software developers. This article aims to investigate the

Software development is the process of building systems that solve users’ need and satisfy stakeholders’ objectives. Such needs are determined through requirements elicitation, which is considered an intensive, complex, and multi-disciplinary process. Traditional methods of elicitation often fail to uncover requirements that are critical for successful and wide-scale user adoption because these methods

Compliance analysis requires legal counsel but is generally unavailable in many software projects. Analysis of legal text using logic-based models can help developers understand requirements for the development and use of software-intensive systems throughout its lifecycle. We outline a practical modeling process for norms in legally binding agreements that include contractual rights and obligations

A renewed understanding of service as a process of resource application and integration, rather than as digital or physical products, shifts the focus of service engineering to the value-creating relationships among entities within complex socio-technical service systems. This understanding is based on Service-Dominant Logic (S-D Logic), a recognized perspective on value creation in modern economies

In order to build resilient systems that can be operational for a long time, it is important that analysts are able to model the evolution of the requirements of that system. The Evolving Intentions framework models how stakeholders’ goals change over time. In this work, our aim is to validate applicability and effectiveness of this technique on a substantial case. In the absence of ground truth about

Requirements elicitation is one of the most important phases in the design process and applied by many engineering disciplines. A more recent application of the design process is to design the enterprise as an artefact, also called enterprise engineering (EE). Even though there are limits to formal enterprise design due to enterprise complexity, strategic intentions are not realised spontaneously or

Automotive manufacturers have historically adopted rigid requirements engineering processes. This allowed them to meet safety-critical requirements when producing a highly complex and differentiated product out of the integration of thousands of physical and software components. Nowadays, few software-related domains are as rapidly changing as the automotive industry. In particular, the needs of improving

Writing clear and unambiguous requirements that are conflict-free and complete is no easy task. Incorrect requirements lead to errors being introduced early in the design process. The longer the gap between error introduction and error discovery, the higher the cost associated with the error. To address the growing cost of system development, we introduce a tool called Analysis of Semantic Specifications

In software reuse, the reuse of UML class diagram produced in design phase has received more attention due to the important influence on the following developing process. The reuse is based on similarity. The similarity between class diagrams contains semantic and structural aspects. The existing works focus on semantic similarity, while the structural similarity is little paid attention to. The structure

Companies that collect personal information online often maintain privacy policies that are required to accurately reflect their data practices and privacy goals. To be comprehensive and flexible for future practices, policies contain ambiguity that summarizes practices over multiple types of products and business contexts. Ambiguity in data practice descriptions undermines policies as an effective

Stakeholder participation is a key success factor of Requirements Engineering (RE). Typically, the techniques used for identifying and involving stakeholders in RE assume that stakeholders can be identified among the members of the organizations involved when a software system is ordered, developed or maintained—and that these stakeholders can be told or even mandated to contribute. However, these

The replacement of legacy systems in the public sector is fraught with project delays, budgetary overruns, technological and business process complexities. Moreover, the software implemented to replace legacy systems is developed or configured to largely mimic their features and functionality in order to minimize the disruption to organizational operations that accompanies the introduction of new technology

Digital motivation refers to the use of software-based solutions to change, enhance, or maintain people’s attitude and behaviour towards specific tasks, policies, and regulations. Gamification, persuasive technology, and entertainment computing are example strands of such a paradigm. Digital motivation has unique properties which necessitate careful consideration of its analysis design methods. This

Interviews are the most widely used elicitation technique in requirements engineering (RE). However, conducting a requirements elicitation interview is challenging. The mistakes made in design or conduct of the interviews can create problems in the later stages of requirements analysis. Empirical evidence about effective pedagogical approaches for training novices on conducting requirements elicitation

For a firm in an open source software (OSS) ecosystem, the requirements engineering (RE) process is rather multifaceted. Apart from its typical RE process, there is a competing process, external to the firm and inherent to the firm’s ecosystem. When trying to impose an agenda in competition with other firms, and aiming to align internal product planning with the ecosystem’s RE process, firms need to

By increasing the importance of the performance in industrial and business software systems, efficient approaches to model-based performance engineering are becoming an inherent part of the development life cycle. Performance engineering at abstract levels of the software development process has an important effect on concluding the success of the software by obtaining the knowledge of optimal alternative

Process mining helps infer valuable insights about business processes using event logs, whereas goal modeling focuses on the representation and analysis of competing goals of stakeholders and systems. Although there are clear benefits in mining the goals of existing processes, goal-oriented approaches that consider logs during model construction are still rare. Process mining techniques, when generalizing

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is a promising paradigm for reusing knowledge and artifacts among similar software products. However, SPLE methods and techniques require a high up-front investment and hence are profitable if several similar software products are developed. Thus in practice adoption of SPLE commonly takes a bottom-up approach, in which analyzing the commonality and variability

Traceability is crucial for many activities in software and systems engineering including monitoring the development progress, and proving compliance with standards. In practice, the use and maintenance of trace links are challenging as artifacts undergo constant change, and development takes place in distributed scenarios with multiple collaborating stakeholders. Although traceability management in

Mobile and web applications that manage users’ personal information require developers to align their software design with privacy requirements commonly described in privacy policies. These policies are often the sole means to enforce accountability on that data protection. We propose the RSL-IL4Privacy, a domain-specific language for specifying privacy policies that can be simultaneously manipulated

We report experience in requirements elicitation of domain knowledge from experts in clinical and cognitive neurosciences. The elicitation target was a causal model for early signs of dementia indicated by changes in user behaviour and errors apparent in logs of computer activity. A Delphi-style process consisting of workshops with experts followed by a questionnaire was adopted. The paper describes

iStar is a goal-based requirements modelling language, being used in both industrial and academic projects of different domains. Often the language is extended to incorporate new constructs related to a particular application domain or to adjust it to practical situations during requirements modelling. Currently, the language is undergoing standardisation, and several studies have focused on the analysis

App features are one of the most important factors that people consider when choosing apps. In order to satisfy users’ needs and attract their eyes, deciding what features should be added in next release becomes very important. Different from traditional requirement elimination, app stores provide a new platform for developers to gather requirements and perform market-wide analysis. Considering that

Traditional test case generation approaches focus on design and implementation models while a large percentage of software errors are caused by the lack of understanding in the early phases. One of the most important models in the early phases of software development is business process model which closely resembles the real world and captures the requirements precisely. The aim of this paper is to

Early phases of information systems engineering include the understanding of the enterprise’s context and the construction of models at different levels of decomposition, required to design the system architecture. These time-consuming activities are usually conducted by relatively large teams, composed of groups of non-technical stakeholders playing mostly an informative role (i.e. not involved in

eLearning systems have become a very important part of teaching, both as web-based systems for online education and as auxiliary tools for face-to-face study, where they provide an additional learning support for on-campus learners. To insure the sustainability of an eLearning system on both individual and social levels, we have to cover many aspects of sustainability requirements: human, technical

This paper proposes a unified knowledge management requirements engineering methodology (KM-REM) for tackling the complex nature of knowledge-intensive organizations. Despite the importance of KM for the success of knowledge-intensive organizations, the concept of RE for KM solutions is still vague lacking. Its definitions and guidelines for addressing the different facets of KM during the RE process

The original version of this article contains an error in the Acknowledgements section. The correct text should read as follows.

Planning an information system (IS) is challenging, especially for inexperienced IS analysts, including students. One area that often causes particular difficulty is defining the requirements of the future system—a phase that is crucial to the success of any IS project. While serving as advisers for students carrying out their first IS projects, we observed that “imagining” the future system’s functionality

Systematically engineering a good user experience (UX) into a computer-based system under development demands that the user requirements of the system reflect all needs, including emotional, of all stakeholders. User requirements address two different types of qualities: pragmatic qualities (PQs), that address system functionality and usability, and hedonic qualities (HQs) that address the stakeholder’s

Much research is ongoing to assess and improve compliance to laws and regulations. As this domain continues to grow and mature, and with more modelling methods introduced to support compliance tasks, important questions need to be asked. What exactly are these methods used for? Where have they been applied? What benefits do they offer? This paper explores how goal-oriented and non-goal-oriented modelling

Rationale refers to the reasoning and justification behind human decisions, opinions, and beliefs. In software engineering, rationale management focuses on capturing design and requirements decisions and on organizing and reusing project knowledge. This paper takes a different view on rationale written by users in online reviews. We studied 32,414 reviews for 52 software applications in the Amazon

Understanding and keeping the customer happy is a central tenet of requirements engineering. Strategies to gather, analyze, and negotiate requirements are complemented by efforts to manage customer input after products have been deployed. For the latter, support tickets are key in allowing customers to submit their issues, bug reports, and feature requests. If insufficient attention is given to support

In agile software development projects, software engineers prioritize implementation over documentation. Is the cost of missing documentation greater than the cost of producing unnecessary or unused documentation? Agile software engineers must still maintain other software artifacts, such as tickets in an issue tracking system or source code committed to a version control system (VCS). Do these artifacts

Cloud computing is used by consumers to access cloud services. Malicious actors exploit vulnerabilities of cloud services to attack consumers. The link between these two assumptions is the cloud service. Although cloud forensics assists in the direction of investigating and solving cloud-based cyber-crimes, in many cases the design and implementation of cloud services fall back. Software designers

Completeness is one of the key attributes for a high-quality software requirements specification. Although incomplete requirements frequently occur in the requirements specification, it is rarely discovered. This turns out to be one of the major causes of software project failure. In order to handle this issue, this paper proposes an automatic approach to recommending omitted steps in a use case-based

Functional safety standards such as IEC 61508 and ISO 26262 advocate a particularly stringent requirements engineering where safety requirements must be structured in a hierarchical manner and specified in accordance with the system architecture. In contrast to the stringent requirements engineering in functional safety standards, according to previous studies, requirements engineering in industry

Companies and government organizations are increasingly compelled, if not required by law, to ensure that their information systems will comply with various federal and industry regulatory standards, such as the NIST Special Publication on Security Controls for Federal Information Systems (NIST SP-800-53), or the Common Criteria (ISO 15408-2). Such organizations operate business or mission critical

E-collaboration systems have become a new way of doing business that supports and enables communication, coordination and cooperation between people in shared projects and so on. Yet, eliciting user requirements for e-collaboration systems has proved to be a great challenge, due to the need to capture different knowledge for many different types of stakeholder. This paper proposes an approach for eliciting

The creation of domain models from qualitative input relies heavily on experience. An uncodified ad-hoc modeling process is still common and leads to poor documentation of the analysis. In this article we present a new method for domain analysis based on qualitative data analysis. The method helps identify inconsistencies, ensures a high degree of completeness, and inherently provides traceability