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Novel Approaches to Theories Underlying Requirements Engineering

Cel

NATURE addresses the central problems of requirements engineering: requirements capture, representation and management of functional and nonfunctional requirements in a process context, the interplay between informal and formal representations, and process traceability and guidance. Comprehensive reuse of requirements experience is supported both at the product and at the process level. To guide the work, a comprehensive framework has been developed to define what requirements engineering is and is not.
An integrated framework for requirements engineering and management, encompassing domain theories, process theories, and knowledge representation theories is being developed that allows comprehensive guidance and reuse of requirements processes. Prototypical tools are developed to demonstrate the theories and empirical studies are conducted to validate them.

The initial integration phase, has resulted in the development of a framework and the design of a coordinated demonstrator prototype intended to show the interplay of the different theories.

Within this framework, contributions have been made to the management and comprehensive reuse of requirements experience. Reuse of system experiences is addressed by reverse modelling, reuse of subject domain knowledge by libraries of domain theories, reuse of process knowledge by libraries of 'situation, decision, action' type process chunks. These processes are supported by formal models represented in the Telos, language, and by software information systems (ConceptBase, SIB) with flexible consistency and completeness checks, hypertext oriented integration of formal and informal representation, and similarity based retrieval.

An initial coordinated demonstrator has been completed; it consists of 8 prototype tools, partially integrated at the data, process, and control level in an innovative manner. The purpose of the demonstrator is to convince industry that standard computer aided systems engineering (CASE) methods can be significantly enhanced (without excessive need for analyst retraining) by back ending and interconnecting them with intelligent support derived from the novel approaches to theories underlying requirements engineering (NATURE).
APPROACH AND METHODS

The NATURE framework views requirements engineering as a process of establishing visions in context. Context is organised according to domain theories and structured around the "four worlds" relevant to information systems. Progress in the requirements process is characterised according to three dimensions of social agreement, cognitive understanding, and technical representation. A process model based on situated decision-making deals with the flexible nature of requirements engineering processes, and has been augmented with the explicit consideration of nonfunctional goals. Knowledge representation theories in NATURE integrate formal, semi-formal and informal representations in the framework of the Telos language, and emphasise automated support over fully formal but not evaluable descriptions.

The emphasis of NATURE is to develop the foundations of all these techniques and to demonstrate their usefulness through prototypical implementations and user studies, often in collaboration with industrial projects.

POTENTIAL

Progress in requirements engineering is crucial for applications such as software development, organisational information systems management, and computer-integrated manufacturing. Collaborations have been established with industrial projects inside and outside ESPRIT in all of these areas, to foster technology transfer and obtain feedback for theory validation. Examples include the F3 and ITHACA projects in ESPRIT, the Quality Management Programme of the German BMFT, and several new ESPRIT proposals. There is also intensive collaboration with several US and Canadian universities and research programmes.

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Koordynator

Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen (RWTH)
Wkład UE
Brak danych
Adres
Sommerfeldstraße 24
52074 Aachen
Niemcy

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