Evaluation method for user requirements documents

Collecting and analyzing user requirements is undoubtedly a really complicated and often problematic process in software development projects. There are several approaches, which suggest ways of managing user’s requirements; some of the most well-known are IEEE 830 software requirements specification (SRS), use cases, interaction design scenarios, etc. Many software experts believe the real user requirements emerge during the development phase. By constantly viewing functional sub-systems of the whole system and participating, in fact, in all phases of system development, customers/users can revise their requirements by adding, deleting, or modifying them. However, in order for this to become possible, it is important to adopt a totally different approach than the traditional one (waterfall model approach), concerning not only the management of user’s requirements, but also the entire software development process in general. Agile methodologies represent this different approach since the iterative and incremental way of development they propose includes user requirements revision mechanisms and user active participation throughout the development of the system. The most famous approach concerning requirements specification among the supporters of the agile methodologies is probably user stories. User stories and their main characteristics are thoroughly demonstrated in this chapter. After reading this chapter, the authors hope that the reader may have gained all the basic understanding regarding the use of user stories.

Collecting and analyzing user requirements is undoubtedly a really complicated and often problematic process in software development projects. There are several approaches, which suggest ways of managing user’s requirements; some of the most well-known are IEEE 830 software requirements specification (SRS), use cases, interaction design scenarios, etc. Many software experts believe the real user requirements emerge during the development phase. By constantly viewing functional sub-systems of the whole system and participating, in fact, in all phases of system development, customers/users can revise their requirements by adding, deleting, or modifying them. However, in order for this to become possible, it is important to adopt a totally different approach than the traditional one (waterfall model approach), concerning not only the management of user’s requirements, but also the entire software development process in general. Agile methodologies represent this different approach since the iterative and incremental way of development they propose includes user requirements revision mechanisms and user active participation throughout the development of the system. The most famous approach concerning requirements specification among the supporters of the agile methodologies is probably user stories. User stories and their main characteristics are thoroughly demonstrated in this chapter. After reading this chapter, the authors hope that the reader may have gained all the basic understanding regarding the use of user stories.

Reuse in Software Development Organizations in Latvia The paper presents the results of a survey, which aims to investigate the field of software reuse in software development organizations in Latvia. The topic has a particular significance since reuse may provide some economic benefits by reducing software development and operating costs, and by efficient utilization of development knowledge and corporate expertise. The objective of the study is to identify the key factors to be considered by the companies interested in establishing a software reuse program, thus improving time-to-market, costs and quality of software products by ingraining reuse into the entire software development process. Twenty factors organized into four categories were considered important within the framework of the survey. The results were obtained through the questionnaire involving software organizations in Latvia, whose responses were analyzed and used to relate the characteristics of organizations with their reuse experience. As a result, the influence of the selected factors on the success of the reuse is evaluated using four different levels (strong, weak, none, no data). Additionally, the paper includes review of related researches and comparison of the results. In conclusion, the author provides suggestions for the improvement of the reuse in Latvian software development organizations on the basis of the survey.

Short development life cycles, the importance of time-to-market and fast changes in technology influence the requirements engineering process. Requirements are exposed to changes during the entire development life cycle, and decisions related to requirements and system design are moving toward developers. For this reason it is important to keep requirement changes under control during the entire development process. This control can be achieved by utilizing Configuration Management (CM) functions and in particular Change Management. This paper describes a model for managing requirements using CM functions. A requirements specification is defined as an hierarchic structure, in which elements of the structure are isolated requirements designated Requirements Specification Items. Having items under version control it is possible to get a better overview of the requirements change process. In the implementation phase, requirement items are associated with Change Requests which define implementations to be introduced in the system. When using Change Requests as links between requirements and the implemented functions we achieve a greater awareness of requirements and a better overview over the requirement process. Furthermore it provides a foundation for reuse of requirements when new systems are built.

Bridging the gap between informal, imprecise, and vague user requirements descriptions and precise formalized specifications is the main task of requirements engineering. Techniques such as interviews or story telling are used when requirements engineers try to identify a user's needs. The requirements specification process is typically done in a dialogue between users, domain experts, and requirements engineers. In our research, we aim at automating the specification of requirements. The idea is to distinguish between untrained users and trained users, and to exploit domain knowledge learned from previous runs of our system. We let untrained users provide unstructured natural language descriptions, while we allow trained users to provide examples of behavioral descriptions. In both cases, our goal is to synthesize formal requirements models similar to statecharts. From requirements specification processes with trained users, behavioral ontologies are learned which are later used to support the requirements specification process for untrained users. Our research method is original in combining natural language processing and search-based techniques for the synthesis of requirements specifications. Our work is embedded in a larger project that aims at automating the whole software development and deployment process in envisioned future software service markets.

A more complete involvement of the technical editor in the development process for a computer product is proposed in connection with the concept of layers of editing, i.e. literary, semantic, perennial, and integrated. It is noted that a technical editor whose skills include the integrated layer can review the entire information interface-the key tops, the panels, the manuals, and the marketing materials. In addition it is noted that integrating the editor into the entire development process requires coordination. The editor should coordinate review activities with other groups in order to promote efficiency and to ensure usability beyond the scope of editorial review.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Software Requirements (SR) are considered as the foundation for a supreme quality software development process and each step of the software development process is dependent and is related to the SR. Software requirements elicitation may be the most important area of requirements engineering and possibly of the entire software development process. There is a lot of human work required in the process of software requirements elicitation and software requirements classification and in cases where the requirements are huge in number, this requirements elicitation and classification process becomes tedious and is prone to errors. We propose a novel approach to automate Requirements Elicitation and Classification using an intelligent conversational chatbot. Utilizing Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, the chatbot converses with stakeholders in Natural Language and elicits formal system requirements from the interaction, and subsequently classifies the elicited requirements into Functional and Non-functional system requirements.

Whatever demographic one belongs to in the technology adaption life cycle, for a seamless implementation of IEC 61850 Standard it is required to answer the key concern related to extent of change. This paper provides guidelines on the evaluation of amount of change by going through the requirement specification process, interface evaluation, and configuration tools. All this information is presented in a process form which makes it easier to quantify the inputs for organizational change management.

Growing vehicle variant diversity, legal requirements to reduce fleet CO2 emissions and innovations in the area of drive train technologies, coupled with the increasing pressure to cut costs, pose new challenges for parties in the automotive sector. An implementation of optimized development and production processes supports the effective handling of these challenges. One important aspect includes engineering efficiency improvement by optimizing the entire automotive bodywork development process and the involved data management. Research activities focus on the data exchange processes between design, simulation and production engineering within various CAx environments. This concerns constantly changing boundary conditions and requirements in the area of automotive body development, including but not limited to the introduction of new materials and material combinations and new types of joining technologies. From the viewpoint of an automotive engineering supplier, additional challenges caused by different customer-related development environments have to be considered. To overcome these challenges, various data exchange strategies between OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturer), automotive suppliers and the use of different data management tools need to be investigated. In this context, the paper presents an approach of an optimized data exchange process of CAD-based data between different CAD (Computer-Aided Design) and CAM (Computer-Aided Manufacturing) environments that supports the entire body development, including data provision for manufacturing engineering. In addition, an optimization of data exchange processes saves development costs and improves the product quality.

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in software engineering, the process of requirements elicitation and specification is considered as a base for all other development process. This means that any fault or mistake in the requirements definition will negatively affect the whole process of software development and consequently affect the cost, time, and effort of the developers and users. Traditionally, the process of requirement elicitation and categorization was done manually and based on the experience of the developers. However, a lot of problem came up because of the absence of automatic approaches. This paper presents a novel approach to improve the process of software requirements classification and mapping. An Information Retrieval (IR) method, namely Latent Drichelt Allocation (LDA) will be used for classification process. A corpus of software requirements also will be built to be used as input space for LDA algorithm. Typically, each requirement will have a corresponding document in the corpus. We conducted two distinct experiments. The first one is to extract the topics of software requirements, and the second one is for mapping and linking any new requirement to the most existing relevant requirements. The results showed that the proposed approach overwhelmed the state-of-art approaches.

Requirements specification, based on informal elicitation of requirements, is a tedious process that is typically performed manually on the basis of informal requirements descriptions, meeting notes, sketches, and other types of documentation, such as regulatory or company-internal standards. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of partially automating this process using Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). We propose an architecture that can retrieve information from a multitude of sources including text documents, images, websites, and PDF documents, and that enables the user to interactively refine requirements documents. Via the RAG pipeline, the architecture can incorporate knowledge and experience from previous, related projects. Session contexts can be persisted and restored, such that refinements can be made subsequently. Using the example of a company providing engineering services in software, hardware, and mechanical engineering, we show that the requirements specification process can be meaningfully accelerated using this architecture. Open-source implementation (code + prompts): https://github.com/frickly-systems/reqrag

This paper is situated in the field of human-machine interaction and particularly deals with the user-centred development of a design concept for an e-learning solution in the domain of data science. The focus of the development lies on usability.Over the last few years there has been a shift from traditional teaching-learning scenarios to software-based e-learning solutions. This transformation has resulted in different challenges in a wide range of subject domains. One of the most difficult challenges is to keep students motivated in using these systems. Especially the area of human-machine interaction offers versatile approaches for improving student motivation.At the Institute for Computer Science and Media in Research and Transfer (CSMRT) at the University of Applied Sciences Mittweida, it is planned to implement an e-learning solution that will enable students to independently acquire knowledge in the field of data science. In order to ensure a high level of acceptance regarding the platform, the design should aim for the best possible usability.In recent years, a wide range of research has been conducted on increasing student motivation in e-learning applications. However, a generalised solution to the problem cannot be found, as students from different disciplines have varying requirements concerning this type of system. Therefore, teaching-learning scenarios need to be specified for the purpose of the research in order to be able to investigate specific requirements for the given designs. In this paper, the target group of the application is limited to students at University of Applied Sciences Mittweida from STEM-related fields of study. Specifically, the domain of data science will be considered. The aim is the student-oriented development of a design concept for the implementation of an e-learning tool aimed at imparting knowledge in the field of data science. In doing so, precise design requirements will be defined, which have not yet been investigated in the context of data science.The development of the design concept will be carried out in a user-centred way and on the basis of standardised specifications and norms in the field of human-machine interaction and usability. Consideration of the students' needs is of particular relevance here. Therefore, students should be involved in the entire development process and help to shape it. This student-oriented development is intended to contribute to the highest possible adaptation of the design to the later user group. The aim is to create a design that is as user-friendly as possible. This should increase the motivation towards using the application.As part of the paper, an evaluation concept will be developed to assess the usability of the resulting design. Just like the development process, the evaluation focuses on students. Since the project is currently in the conceptual phase, the evaluation will be carried out using a paper prototype. The results will serve as a base for an iterative process of implementing and evaluating the application.

Agent oriented software development is generally motivated by the need of open and adaptive systems development that continuously change and evolve to meet new requirements. In this paper, we propose an agent-based open and adaptive system development process. The proposed methodology is based on model-based techniques and provides a specific model for the type of information to be gathered and uses this model to drive the user-oriented requirement analysis, specification and system-oriented analysis process. The proposed methodology also reduces the complexity of the software system and provides better quality with better user-satisfaction. The Gaia and ROADMAP models have been used as a fundamental ingredient to the new proposed agent-based modeling method. In the proposed agent-based system, the focus is on a clear separation between the requirement gathering and analysis phases. The scope of the discussion covers requirements gathering and user-oriented analysis phases only and does not touch upon the system analysis and design phases.

Generally, the tool and die industry is acting as a tooling supplier for customers' product development. It is widely acknowledged that tool and die suppliers are now more than ever having to improve the cooperation or collaboration level with their customers to gain the tooling market. However, real cooperation or collaboration between product customer and tool and die supplier cannot be achieved before an appropriate partnership is developed. Moreover, the partnership needs to be adaptive to the changing market and requirement levels of customers. The purpose of the present research is to investigate adaptive partnership development between product customer and tool and die supplier through several steps. A set of performance measurements are defined to help the product customer evaluate the capability of tool and die supplier candidates. Different interfaces between product customer and tool and die supplier are analysed. How to develop the right interface structure for adaptive partnership between them is discussed. According to the rational early supplier involvement (ESI) methodology, the adaptive partnership requires the tool and die supplier to justify its role as an active partner along the entire product development process chain, and a decision model is established to specify the ESI partnership between product customer and tool and die supplier. It is suggested that the collaborative partnership be implemented through stronger integration of the tool and die supplier's know-how into the customer's product development process. It is hoped that this research idea can provide comprehensive support for partnership development and management between product customer and tool and die supplier.