Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This chapter presents a brief overview of requirements engineering and provides an introduction to some of the critical aspects of this field. This includes offering and understanding of the different levels of requirements involved in requirements engineering, namely organizational, product and project level requirements, and illustrating the role of different stakeholders in requirements engineering. The chapter also aims to demonstrate how the three parts of this book are interrelated.

Requirements elicitation is the process of seeking, uncovering, acquiring, and elaborating requirements for computer based systems. It is generally understood that requirements are elicited rather than just captured or collected. This implies there are discovery, emergence, and development elements in the elicitation process. Requirements elicitation is a complex process involving many activities with a variety of available techniques, approaches, and tools for performing them. The relative strengths and weaknesses of these determine when each is appropriate depending on the context and situation. The objectives of this chapter are to present a comprehensive survey of important aspects of the techniques, approaches, and tools for requirements elicitation, and examine the current issues, trends, and challenges faced by researchers and practitioners in this field.

The main aim of this chapter is to present and discuss a set of modeling and specification techniques, in what concerns their ontology and support in the requirements representation of computer-based systems. A systematic classification of meta-models, also called models of computation, is presented. This topic is highly relevant since it supports the definition of sound specification methodologies in relation to the semantic definition of the modeling views to adopt for a given system. The usage and applicability of Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams is also related to their corresponding meta-models. A set of desirable characteristics for the specification methodologies is presented and justified to allow system designers and requirements engineers to more consciously define or choose a particular specification methodology. A heuristic-based approach to support the transformation of user into system requirements is suggested, with some graphical examples in UML notation.

This chapter provides an overview of techniques for prioritization of requirements for software products. Prioritization is a crucial step towards making good decisions regarding product planning for single and multiple releases. Various aspects of functionality are considered, such as importance, risk, cost, etc. Prioritization decisions are made by stakeholders, including users, managers, developers, or their representatives. Methods are for combining individual prioritizations based on overall objectives and constraints. A range of different techniques and aspects are applied to an example to illustrate their use. Finally, limitations and shortcomings of current methods are pointed out, and open research questions in the area of requirements prioritization are discussed.

It is well acknowledged in practice as well as in research that requirements are related to each other and that these relationships affect software development work in various ways. This chapter addresses requirements interdependencies, starting from a traceability perspective. The focus of the chapter is on giving an overview of requirements interdependency research and on synthesizing this into a model of fundamental interdependency types and a research agenda for the area. Furthermore, a description of how knowledge about requirements interdependencies can facilitate various activities within software engineering is provided. The main challenges for the future are to understand the nature of requirements interdependencies and to develop approaches that enable to identify, describe and effectively deal with them in the software development process.

Software changes are necessary and inevitable in software development, but may lead to software deterioration if not properly controlled. Impact analysis is the activity of identifying what needs to be modified in order to make a change, or to determine the consequences on the system if the change is implemented. Most research on impact analysis is presented and discussed in literature related to software maintenance. In this chapter, we take a different approach and discuss impact analysis from a requirements engineering perspective. We relate software change to impact analysis, outline the history of impact analysis and present common strategies for performing impact analysis. We also mention the application of impact analysis to non-functional requirements and discuss tool support for impact analysis. Finally, we outline what we see as the future of this essential change management tool.

Negotiation is regarded as crucial in many disciplines, and negotiation methods and tools are increasingly studied by requirements engineering researchers and practitioners. The objectives of this chapter are to motivate the need for negotiation in requirements engineering, to introduce fundamental concepts and terminology, and to provide an overview about negotiation research. We structure the existing research (a) by presenting a general negotiation process highlighting typical negotiation stages; (b) by introducing a framework covering important dimensions of requirements negotiation comprising the conflict resolution strategy, the collaboration situation of the stakeholders, and the degree of negotiation tool support; and (c) by discussing and classifying existing negotiation tools using the general process and framework.

This chapter presents a survey of the state of the art for quality assurance for requirements. The meaning of quality in the requirements context is discussed, as is the influence of the quality assurance during requirements on other parts of the development. Different quality assurance approaches are categorized as either constructive (e.g., standards, guidelines, elicitation techniques) or analytical (e.g., inspections) and discussed with respect to their impact on the requirements quality. Based on the approaches, future challenges are discussed. The main future challenges lie in investigating the return on investment of quality assurance in the requirements context and to provide more empirical results which approach that effectively prevent or detect which problems.

The concept of goal has been used in many domains such as management sciences and strategic planning, artificial intelligence and human computer interaction. Recently, goal-driven approaches have been developed and tried out to support requirements engineering activities such as requirements elicitation, specification, validation, modification, structuring and negotiation. This chapter first review various research efforts undertaken in this line of research and presents the state-of-the-art in using goals to engineer requirements. It then presents a particular goal model, the goal/strategy map, and shows that maps can help with facing the challenge of new emerging multi-purposes systems, i.e. systems imposing variability in requirements elaboration and customization in the requirements engineering process.

An increasing number of market and technology driven software development companies face the challenge of managing an enormous amount of requirements written in natural language. As requirements arrive at high pace, the requirements repository easily deteriorates, impeding customer feedback and well-founded decisions for future product releases. In this chapter we introduce a linguistic engineering approach in support of large-scale requirements management. We present three case studies, encompassing different requirements management processes, where our approach has been evaluated. We also discuss the role of natural language requirements and present a survey of research aimed at giving support in the engineering and management of natural language requirements.