Quality Aspects in Requirements Engineering

Foreword by the chairs

Maria Lencastre, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil

Alberto Silva, Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal

Quality is often considered something that must be in conformance with system requirements. However, such requirements keep changing to be aligned with the business needs, thus making quality a moving target! Requirements engineering helps to elicit the stakeholders requirements (such in a form of general goals, user stories, use cases, constraints etc.) with respect to the system of interested, to prioritize such requirements and, ultimately, to reach a common ground with other stakeholders with conflicting requirements. Furthermore, it helps stakeholders from different backgrounds to communicate among them, and with even with the project team, with systems designers, developers, testers, etc. The former are not necessarily interested in the implementation technical details, while the latter are specialized in designing, building and testing such systems. Caught in-between, requirements engineers must also keep up with newer development approaches.

The “Quality in ICT Requirements Engineering” Thematic Track 2016 has at its accepted papers a multitude of relevant topics such as: requirements elicitation and specification, requirements traceability, requirements prioritization, ontologies for embed systems, and requirements specification tools. This program includes five full papers and two work-in-progress papers, detailed next.

The paper “Achieving better requirements to code traceability: Which refactoring should be done first?”, by researchers from University of Dhaka (Bangladesh) and Daffodil International University (Bangladesh) considers that refactoring methods - like rename identifier - have positive impact in supporting traceability. For this investigation four refactoring methods were used, and applied on two different code bases. From its reported experiment it was observed that: introducing a parameter object improves requirements to code traceability; inline class and conditional decomposition show a little but positive influence; and the pull up method shows no improvements in traceability respect.

The paper “Multi-VisioTrace: Traceability Visualization Tool”, by authors from Brazil (Pernambuco University and Federal Rural University of Pernambuco) details a tool to support traceability visualization that provides different visualization techniques, allowing the user to choose the most appropriate to execute his/her task. The evaluation results of the proposed tool are presented and evaluated through two examples.

The paper “Requirements Prioritization in Market-Driven Software: a case study based on large numbers of stakeholders and requirements” by three colleagues from Fortaleza University, Ceará (Brazil) presents a case study of COTS software requirements prioritization to be used by thousands of users. The Hierarchical Cumulative Voting requirements prioritization technique was addressed and applied through a web questionnaire directly to potential users. Eighty respondents answered the questionnaire, and a score of requirements in ratio scale of measurement was obtained. It was found that the applied technique can respond positively to the needs and characteristics of Market-Driven Software Development, in similar situations to those described.

The paper “Use of Ontologies in Embedded Systems: a Systematic Mapping”, by authors from University of Pernambuco together with Federal University of Pernanambuco (Brazil), presents a conducted systematic mapping, to collect evidences about the need of ontologies in embedded systems development. The focus was on the identification of an ontology that represents languages used for the development of embedded systems.

The paper “A fully automated approach to discovering non-determinism in state machine diagrams” by authors from University of Ottawa (Canada), presents an automated technique to detect non-determinism in state diagrams. The authors leverage the nuXmv model checker to analyze unbounded (i.e. integer and real) domains and implement an algorithm that systematically computes a minimal set of comparable transitions for the SUD yet eliminates false positives by model checking. To validate the approach, they analyze a real-world system and report discovered cases of non-determinism.

The works-in-progress paper “Comparison of Research and Practice Regarding What We Mean by “the Right Software Requirements Elicitation Technique”, from University of Atacama (Chile), presents a systematic mapping of constructs, which researchers define as good techniques, and compares with practitioners’ opinions. The results demonstrate the divergence of views between researchers and practitioners about the quality of software requirement elicitation techniques.

The works-in-progress paper “Implicit Priorities in Adaptation Requirements”, by authors from the University of Pernambuco and Federal University of Pernambuco (Brazil). In this work the authors analyze the relationship between requirements prioritization and software adaptation; and, through an analysis of two selected frameworks, present findings as well as an initial proposal for interleaving prioritization activities with adaptation activities.

Maria Lencastre received her B.Sc, M.Sc and D.Sc. in Computer Science at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil. She was a visiting professor at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal for the 2008 academic year. She is a professor of the University of Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil, since 2004. She was the head of Computer Engineering Department in 2010 and 2011. She is the general co-chair of the 31 the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (ACMSAC'16), that will occur in Pisa-Italy in 2016, and the secretary of the ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing (SIGAPP). Maria Lencastre was the PC Chair of Requirements Engineering-Track, part of ACMSAC, from 2008 to 2015. She was the PC Chair of Software Requirements Engineering Track on CIBse 2014, and also the Chair of the thematic track “Quality in ICT Requirements Engineering” part of the 9th International Conference on the Quality of Information and Communications Technology. Maria Lencastre was the Tutorial Co-Chair of 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE´13), and the Panel Chair at RE@Brazil’13. She was the Chair of the Thematic Track Quality in ICT Requirements Engineering, part of 8th QUATIC´12. She was the general chair of IDEAS 2008 – 11th Ibero-American Workshop on Requirement Engineering. She was the chair of the seven editions of RE-Track (ACM-SAC’08 to ACM-SAC’15). She was the co-chair of Workshop on Requirement Engineering (WER´11) part of Cibse´11 in Rio Janeiro-Brazil. She was also a member of the local organizer committee of 6th Latin American Conference on Pattern Languages of Programming (SugarLoafPLoP´07). She is a member of the program committee of several international events in the area.