Software requirement engineering over the federated environment in distributed software development process

Abstract

In the recent past, the distributed software development (DSD) process has become increasingly prevalent with the rapid evolution of the software development process. This transformation would necessitate a robust framework for software requirement engineering (SRE) to work in federated environments. Using the federated environment, multiple independent software entities would work together to develop software, often across organizations and geographical borders. The decentralized structure of the federated architecture makes requirement elicitation, analysis, specification, validation, and administration more effective. The proposed model emphasizes flexibility and agility, leveraging the collaboration of multiple localized models within a diversified development framework. This collaborative approach is designed to integrate the strengths of each local process, ultimately resulting in the creation of a robust software prototype. The performance of the proposed DSD model is evaluated using two case studies on the E-Commerce website and the Learning Management system. The proposed model is analyzed by considering divergent functional and non-functional requirements for each of the case studies and analyzing the performance using standardized metrics like mean square error (MSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC). It is observed that the proposed model exhibited a reasonable performance with an MSE value of 0.12 and 0.153 for both functional and non-functional requirements, respectively, and an MAE value of 0.222 and 0.232 for both functional and non-functional requirements, respectively.