REMM-Studio + : Modeling Variability to Enable Requirements Reuse

Requirement engineering (RE) is the process of discovering stakeholders’ requirements and needs and documenting them in such a way that they can serve as the basis for all other system development activities. Despite recent advances in RE practices and tools, requirements engineers are still experiencing fundamental problems. Therefore, the identification and characterization of such challenges would help RE practitioners manage and overcome such difficulties allowing them to meet expected quality objectives. The main objective of this paper is to identify and compare RE challenges reported in the literature and in practice. To this aim, we have conducted a systematic mapping study to collect and analyze RE challenges in the literature. Furthermore, we have also conducted a questionnaire-based empirical investigation to collect and analyze RE challenges faced by IT practitioners working for 15 companies located in four different countries. Results show that the top challenges are the same in the literature and in practice. However, overall, our comparative study revealed a weak positive correlation between RE challenges in the literature and in practice (Spearman coefficient = 0.3061). This weak positive relationship indicates that some of the challenges found in the literature are not perceived by the participant to have a great impact on the practice. This may be due to the fact that solutions to (or guidelines to avoid) some of the identified challenges have been provided by the surveyed corporations.

The development of complex sustainable systems presents a number of challenges in requirements engineering (RE). It is difficult to elicit, analyze, and specify interdisciplinary system requirements that have to be fulfilled in order to develop a complex sustainable system. This paper argues for a need for a significant shift in the underlying RE ideas and premises in order to effectively cope with RE challenges of complex sustainable systems development. We present the main requirements for the development of strategic RE methods based on a number of systems, methodological, and epistemological perspective shifts. Strategic RE paradigm shift facilitates adaptation of primarily technological system‐specific RE knowledge in order to handle large scale interdisciplinary sustainability‐related RE challenges. ©2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 16

Oil provides 33% of the world’s energy (Wilcox, 2014) and transportation engines account for over 60% of the 70 million barrels of crude used each day. Engines power the world’s roughly one billion passenger vehicles, as well as trucks and heavy-duty vehicles. In theUSA, engines consume 14million barrels of oil per day or 2.5 gal/person. Since there are insufficient reserves, 62% is imported, and at current prices (e.g., $80 a barrel), the USA spends about 1 billion dollars a day on imported oil. is also impacts national security. It is unreasonable to think that this vast consumption of fuel is sustainable. But prospects for replacing the IC engine with more fuel efficient and cleaner power plants are not hopeful. Indeed, a recent report (NRC, 2011) concluded that “. . .the internal combustion engine (ICE) will be the dominant prime mover for light-duty vehicles for many years, probably decades. us, it is clearly important to perform R&D to provide a better understanding of the fundamental processes affecting engine efficiency and the production of undesirable emissions.” Also, there is no obvious alternative to the IC engine for mediumand heavy-duty commercial vehicles, which account for a quarter of all fuel used (mostly diesel). e fuel used by IC engines also has a major impact on our global environment. Burning one 1 kg of fuel consumes about 15 kg of air, and signi cant energy is required to pump it into and out of the engine. In addition, about 3 kg of CO2 is generated, which contributes to the world’s annual production of 37 billion tons of CO2, a major green house gas (GHG). Some fear that GHGs can cause climate change with unpredictable consequences. To address this problem, the International Energy Agency’s roadmap is to reduce fuel use by 30–50% in new road vehicles worldwide by 2030, and in all vehicles by 2050 (IEA, 2012). Although 2050 appears distant, the time required to bring new engines to production, together with the years needed for new technology to permeate the vehicle eet, means that major effort (and investment) will be required. us, the grand challenge faced by engine and automotive engineering researchers over the next decades will be to devise technological advances thatmaximize engine efficiency, minimize pollutant emissions, and optimize tolerance to a wider variety of fuels in power generation and transportation systems.

Agile practices overcome many challenges in Requirements Engineering (RE); but they contribute to create new challenges, such as a lack of customer trust and consensus during the iterative RE. Recently, researchers have shed light on affect and affective trust as influential factors on individual behaviour in software development. This position paper proposes a framework to consider the role of affect and affective trust within agile practices for RE in order to recognize the positive and negative influences of affect and affective trust. The framework considers the positive affects as an indicator for increasing the amount of affective trust between agile team members, including customers. Further, the framework highlights the possible role of negative affects in order to recognize the negative consequences on agile practices along with the amount of affective trust during the iterative RE. This ongoing research intends to collect and analyze both quantitative and qualitative data in the forms of survey research and interviews in order to test the framework and confirm the research hypotheses.

Representing software project vision by means of video: A quality model for vision videos

Ambiguity in natural language requirements has long been recognized as an inevitable challenge in requirements engineering (RE). Various initiatives have been taken by RE researchers to address the challenges of ambiguity. In this paper the results of a mapping study are presented that focus on the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for addressing ambiguity in requirements. Systematic review of the literature resulted in 174 studies on the subject published during 1995 to 2015, and out of these only 28 are empirically evaluated studies that were selected. From of the resulting set of papers, 81% have focused on detecting ambiguity; whereas 4% and 5% are focusing on reducing and removing ambiguity respectively. Addressing syntactic, semantic, and lexical ambiguities has attracted more attention than other types. In spite of all the research efforts, there is a lack of empirical evaluation of NLP tools and techniques for addressing ambiguity in requirements. The results have pointed out some gaps in empirical results and have raised questions the designing of an analytical framework for research in this field.

In process of software development, requirement engineering is one of the main pillars and important elements because of the role it plays. Requirements acts as baseline upon which the pacts between the team members, people using it and those purchasing it are affirmed. For an increasing number of globalization and technological reasons, it is imperative to note that software development has grown in recent years and has resulted in several changes that are crucial in the establishment of development projects. The change is supported and geared by the desire to work round the clock and capitalize on the extensive number of available resources, reduce on expenses and the urge to be near or closer to the users but the negative effect of such applications is the risks associated with gaps in communications. The distributed development of software is a complex phenomenon, facing the challenges like: geographical separation of project members, different time zones, different languages, different backgrounds, team structure, organizational structure, communication and technology to be used for communication and coordination.

Project success in the automotive industry is highly influenced by requirements engineering (RE), for which communication and organisation structure play a major role, much due to the scale and distribution of these projects. However, empirical research is scarce on these aspects of automotive RE and warrants closer examination. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to identify problems or challenges in automotive RE with respect to communication and organisation structure. Using a multiple-case study approach, we collected data via 14 semi-structured interviews at one car manufacturer and one supplier. We tested our findings from the case study with a questionnaire distributed to practitioners in the automotive industry. Our results indicate that it is difficult but increasingly important to establish communication channels outside the fixed organisation structure and that responsibilities are often unclear. Product knowledge during early requirements elicitation and context knowledge later on is lacking. Furthermore, abstraction gaps between requirements on different abstraction levels leads to inconsistencies. For academia, we formulate a concrete agenda for future research. Practitioners can use the findings to broaden their understanding of how the problems manifest and to improve their organisations.

Development of software product lines is particularly complex, raising specific and advanced challenges for requirements engineering and management. This paper gives an overview of these challenges, as they were identified in three related investigations that involved several industrial software product line organizations.

We present a new version of ALICA - “A Language for Interactive Cooperative Agents”. The ALICA framework is a highly reactive multi-agent framework and comprises three components for working with multi-agent plans: a specification language, an execution engine, and a graphical modelling tool. The framework automatically coordinates teams, allocates tasks to team members, and compensates execution failures in a fully distributed manner. In a major redesign, we extended the description language and re-implemented the execution engine and graphical modelling tool. As a result, the second version of ALICA encompasses fewer dependencies, is domain independent, and adaptable to different environments.

To prepare the next generation of civil engineers to tackle 21st century challenges, engineering education must commit to deepening engineer’s social consciousness through exposure to societal problems in addition to teaching technical competencies. The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Grand Challenges for Engineering offers a framework for exposing students to the role of a modern engineer and the complex global challenges that require engineering intervention. In response to these challenges, many U.S. engineering schools have adopted the Grand Challenge Scholars (GCS) program to educate a new generation of engineering professionals equipped to sustainably address society’s most imminent problems. This paper presents the development of a holistic rubric to assess student scholarship and inform competencies related to Grand Challenges. The rubric builds on best practices in assessment and evaluation of the five key NAE GCS program components, including 1) hands-on project/research experience, 2) interdisciplinary curriculum, 3) entrepreneurship, 4) global dimension, and 5) service-learning. The authors discuss potential applications of the rubric to evaluate course-level outcomes, including student projects from an interdisciplinary course entitled “Creatively Applying Science for Sustainability.” In the course, students work to address a societal Grand Challenge in a semester-long project and in interdisciplinary student projects that tackle Grand Challenges on an international scale. This rubric fills a literature gap in assessing 21 century global engineering skills by measuring capabilities based on five key NAE GCS program components and provides a mechanism to understand and influence the quality of student education and experiences within Grand Challenge-focused courses and programs.

Through the technical analysis of existing modeling tools, combined with Web technology, this paper presents a graphical workflow modeling tool design program, through which designers can draw process directly in the browser and automatically transform the drawn process description in XML description file, to facilitate the workflow engine analysis and barrier-free sharing of workflow data in a networked environment. The program has software reusability, cross-platform, scalability, and strong practicality.

FIELD GRAND CHALLENGE article Front. Environ. Eng., 02 December 2022 Volume 1 - 2022 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fenve.2022.1052154

Classical studies have focused on the calculation of power system reliability, for example, the loss of load probability, or the expected time of load unserved; and classical studies also describe how to use parallel circuits, increased generation margin, and component redundancy to improve reliability. However, contemporary thoughts on this topic are quite differently focused: modem power system reliability relates more to the following items than the classical subjects listed above: electric power quality; extreme bus voltage reliability, for example 'five nines' (i.e., 0.99999 availability), or six nines or even higher; utilization of new transmission and distribution technologies for improvement of reliability; utilization of distributed energy sources (DERs) to improve reliability; working with manufacturers of information technology equipment to reduce load vulnerability; distributed rather than concentrated loads; and loop circuits for distribution systems. This paper discusses IT and sensitive manufacturing loads, potential research on agent technology for DERs, and the N nines reliability challenge.

It is not feasible to engineer requirements for adaptable and open service-oriented systems (AOSS) by specifying stakeholders’ expectations in detail during system development. Openness and adaptability allow new services to appear at runtime so that ways in, and degrees to which the initial functional and nonfunctional requirements will be satisfied may vary at runtime. To remain relevant after deployment, the initial requirements specification ought to be continually updated to reflect such variation. Depending on the frequency of updates, this paper separates the requirements engineering (RE) of AOSS onto the RE for: individual services (Service RE), service coordination mechanisms (Coordination RE), and quality parameters and constraints guiding service composition (Client RE). To assist existing RE methodologies in dealing with Client RE, the Dynamic Requirements Adaptation Method (DRAM) is proposed. DRAM updates a requirements specification at runtime to reflect change due to adaptability and openness.