[AISWorld] Requirements Engineering Journal Vol. 17, No.4

[Pericles Loucopoulos]

REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING, Published by Springer

Volume  17,   Number  4  (2012), 255-330, DOI:  

http://www.springerlink.com/content/ghh0l645j28n/

Journal Home Page: http://www.springer.com/computer/swe/journal/766

 

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

“Quality requirements engineering for systems and software architecting: methods, approaches, and tools” By Rafael Capilla, Muhammad Ali Babar and Oscar Pastor 

ABSTRACT

Requirements engineering and software architecture are quite mature software engineering sub-disciplines, which often seem to be disconnected for many reasons and it is difficult to perceive the impact of functional and non-functional requirements on architecture and to establish appropriate trace links for traceability purposes. In other cases, the estimation of how non-functional requirements, as the quality properties a system should pose, is not perceived useful enough to produce high-quality software. Therefore, in this special issue, we want to highlight the importance and the role of quality requirements for architecting and building complex software systems that in many cases require multidisciplinary engineering techniques, which increases the complexity of the software development process.

 

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

“Deriving software architectural models from requirements models for adaptive systems: the STREAM-A approach” By João Pimentel, Márcia Lucena, Jaelson Castro, Carla Silva and Emanuel Santos, et al.

ABSTRACT

Some quality attributes are known to have an impact on the overall architecture of a system, so that they are required to be properly handled from the early beginning of the software development. For example, adaptability is a key concern for autonomic and adaptive systems, which brings to them the capability to alter their behavior in response to changes on their surrounding environments. In this paper, we propose a Strategy for Transition between Requirements and Architectural Models for Adaptive systems (STREAM-A). In particular, we use goal models based on the i* (i-Star) framework to support the design and evolution of systems that require adaptability. To obtain software architectures for such systems, the STREAM-A approach uses model transformations from i* models to architectural models expressed in Acme. Both the requirements and the architectural model are refined to accomplish the adaptability requirement.

 

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

“Setting quality targets for coming releases with QUPER: an industrial case study” By Richard Berntsson Svensson, Yuri Sprockel, Björn Regnell and Sjaak Brinkkemper

ABSTRACT

Quality requirements play a critical role in driving architectural design and are an important issue in software development. Therefore, quality requirements need to be considered, specified, and quantified early during system analysis and not later in the development phase in an ad-hoc fashion. This paper presents the quality performance model that estimates quality targets in relation to market expectations as a basis for the architecting of quality requirements. The purpose of the model is to provide concepts for qualitative reasoning of quality levels in the decision-making of setting actual targets of quality requirements for coming releases of the product. The quality performance model is evaluated at one case company, using a market-driven development approach, in the electronic payment-processing domain. The results show that the model is useful for supporting early decision-making in, e.g., release planning of quality requirements.



ORIGINAL ARTICLE

“An integrated strategy to systematically understand and manage quality in use for web applications” By Philip Lew, Luis Olsina, Pablo Becker and Li Zhang

ABSTRACT

The main goal in evaluating software quality is to ultimately improve its quality. In this work, we discuss SIQinU (Strategy for Improving Quality in Use), a six-phased evaluation-driven strategy for understanding and improving software quality requirements in a systematic way. Starting with quality in use (QinU), we design specific user tasks and context of use, and through identifying problems in QinU, we determine external quality (EQ) attributes that could be related to these QinU weakly performing indicators. Then, after deriving EQ attributes related to the QinU problems, we evaluate EQ and derive a benchmark to be used as a basis to make improvements. Once improvement recommendations are made based on poorly performing EQ indicators, a new version of the software application is completed and evaluated again for its EQ to establish a delta from the initial benchmark. Then, we re-evaluate QinU to determine the improvements resulting in QinU from the improvements made at the EQ level, thus leading to a cyclic strategy for improvement and development of relationships. SIQinU is a repeatable and consistent strategy which relies on: a conceptual framework (with ontological base), a process, and specific methods. In order to illustrate SIQinU, a real case study is conducted.  


  
_______________________________________________
Professor Pericles Loucopoulos
Loughborough University,  p.loucopoulos at lboro.ac.uk
The University of Manchester, pericles.loucopoulos at mbs.ac.uk
Harokopio University of Athens, p.loucopoulos at hua.gr
web: http://www.dit.hua.gr/~p.loucopoulos

Editor-in-Chief, Requirements Engineering
http://www.springer.com/computer/swe/journal/766

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