{"title":"Towards A Theory of Shared Understanding of Non-Functional Requirements in Continuous Software Engineering","authors":"Colin M. Werner","doi":"10.1145/3510454.3517069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3510454.3517069","url":null,"abstract":"Building shared understanding of requirements is key to ensuring downstream software activities are efficient and effective. Non-functional requirements (NFR), which include performance, availability, and maintainability, are vitally important to overall software quality. Research has shown NFRs are, in practice, poorly defined and difficult to verify, especially in agile environments. Continuous software engineering (CSE) practices, which extend agile practices, emphasize fast paced, automated, and rapid release of software that poses additional challenges to NFRs. However, the level of shared understanding achieved across an organization is not well-understood. This dissertation will build the foundations towards a theory of the complex and intricate relationship between shared understanding of NFRs and CSE.","PeriodicalId":440285,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131288986","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Y. D. Pham, Abir Bouraffa, Marleen Hillen, W. Maalej
{"title":"The Role of Linguistic Relativity on the Identification of Sustainability Requirements: An Empirical Study","authors":"Y. D. Pham, Abir Bouraffa, Marleen Hillen, W. Maalej","doi":"10.1109/RE51729.2021.00018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE51729.2021.00018","url":null,"abstract":"Linguistic-Relativity-Theory states that language and its structure influence people’s world view and cognition. We investigate how this theory impacts the identification of requirements in practice. To this end, we conducted two controlled experiments with 101 participants. We randomly showed participants a set of requirements dimensions (i.e. a language structure) either with a focus on software quality or on sustainability and asked them to identify the requirements for a grocery shopping app according to these dimensions. Participants of the control group were not given any dimensions. The results show that the use of requirements dimensions significantly increases the number of identified requirements in comparison to the control group. Furthermore, participants who were given the sustainability dimensions identified more sustainability requirements. In follow up interviews with 16 practitioners, the interviewees reported benefits of the dimensions such as a holistic guidance but were also concerned about the customers acceptance. Furthermore, they stated challenges of implementing sustainability dimensions in the daily business but also suggested solutions like establishing sustainability as a common standard. Our study indicates that carefully structuring requirements engineering along sustainability dimensions can guide development teams towards considering and ensuring software sustainability.","PeriodicalId":440285,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126461112","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Web Accessibility Requirements Framework for Agile Development","authors":"Darliane Miranda","doi":"10.1109/RE51729.2021.00071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE51729.2021.00071","url":null,"abstract":"In the Software Engineering area, Web Accessibility is gaining more space, establishing itself as an important quality attribute. In the context of agile development, approaching this type of requirement by development teams is still a challenging task, as there is often a lack of knowledge about the domain and a lack of methods or tools to support the specification of accessibility requirements, which end up being neglected or considered only in the final phase of the projects. Therefore, this work proposes the development of a framework to support the specification of web accessibility requirements in an agile context. The framework consists of automating the reuse of accessibility requirements, supporting the generation of artifacts, such as user stories, thus improving communication between stakeholders and supporting the analysis of the possible impact of these accessibility requirements on other system features.","PeriodicalId":440285,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"35 5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116615332","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Welcome from the RE 2021 Organizers","authors":"","doi":"10.1109/re51729.2021.00005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/re51729.2021.00005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":440285,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"47 3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114311007","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Muneera Bano, Chetan Arora, D. Zowghi, Alessio Ferrari
{"title":"The Rise and Fall of COVID-19 Contact-Tracing Apps: when NFRs Collide with Pandemic","authors":"Muneera Bano, Chetan Arora, D. Zowghi, Alessio Ferrari","doi":"10.1109/RE51729.2021.00017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE51729.2021.00017","url":null,"abstract":"To complement the manual contact-tracing methods, a flood of coronavirus-related apps was launched in the first half of 2020. Despite the incredible promises made by the governments, contact-tracing apps did not live up to expectations. We provide a contextual perspective of the government commissioned contact-tracing apps from four countries to understand the non-functional requirements (NFRs) and socio-technical factors that hindered the success of these apps. We collected the user reviews from the app stores for iOS and Android versions and identified top news articles related to each app. Our analysis revealed that the dominant factors behind the negligible success of these apps are complex and entangled with the cultural and political dimensions rather than being just technical. The multilayer diversity of the target users also impacted the design and development of contact-tracing apps in an extremely challenging situation. This perspective paper brings into light important elements, such as politics and socio-cultural aspects that should be studied in the design of contact-tracing apps, and public apps in general.","PeriodicalId":440285,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128101723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
R. Mekala, Asif Irfan, Eduard C. Groen, Adam Porter, Mikael Lindvall
{"title":"Classifying User Requirements from Online Feedback in Small Dataset Environments using Deep Learning","authors":"R. Mekala, Asif Irfan, Eduard C. Groen, Adam Porter, Mikael Lindvall","doi":"10.1109/RE51729.2021.00020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE51729.2021.00020","url":null,"abstract":"An overwhelming number of users access app repositories like App Store/Google Play and social media platforms like Twitter, where they provide feedback on digital experiences. This vast textual corpus comprising user feedback has the potential to unearth detailed insights regarding the users’ opinions on products and services. Various tools have been proposed that employ natural language processing (NLP) and traditional machine learning (ML) based models as an inexpensive mechanism to identify requirements in user feedback. However, they fall short on their classification accuracy over unseen data due to factors like the cost of generating voluminous de-biased labeled datasets and general inefficiency. Recently, Van Vliet et al. [1] achieved state-of-the-art results extracting and classifying requirements from user reviews through traditional crowdsourcing. Based on their reference classification tasks and outcomes, we successfully developed and validated a deep-learning-backed artificial intelligence pipeline to achieve a state-of-the-art averaged classification accuracy of ∼87% on standard tasks for user feedback analysis. This approach, which comprises a BERT-based sequence classifier, proved effective even in extremely low-volume dataset environments. Additionally, our approach drastically reduces the time and costs of evaluation, and improves on the accuracy measures achieved using traditional ML-/NLP-based techniques.","PeriodicalId":440285,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128933996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Representing Human Barriers in Requirements Engineering: The Case of Electronic Health Records","authors":"M. Levy, Michal Pauzner, I. Hadar","doi":"10.1109/RE51729.2021.00041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE51729.2021.00041","url":null,"abstract":"Human barriers were found to impede the acceptance, adoption, or effective use of technology, manifested as under-usage of systems, non-compliance with regulations, short-term use of behavioral change systems, and more. These barriers can be overcome only by meeting appropriate requirements. However, such requirements are frequently overlooked. Different visual models are offered for supporting the derivation of requirements from, e.g., goals and emotions; however, we found no visualization techniques that support the elicitation and specification of requirements derived from known human barriers. The recruitment of Service Design visualization methods for visually expressing such barriers may help bridge this gap. This paper presents this vision and a demonstration for the case of Electronic Health Records, utilizing the Causal Loop Diagram to represent clinicians’ barriers when using a system. The visualization enabled by the diagram allows, for example, identification of use cases in which the system output may be overloaded with information (inducing cognitive overload) and still lacking relevant information (e.g., patient information beyond their clinical data), ultimately leading to suboptimal clinical decisions. This demonstration indicates the promise of this approach for eliciting frequently missed requirements rooted in users’ cognitive barriers.","PeriodicalId":440285,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125457200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"ELFIEP: Evolutionary Lifecycle Framework for Industrial Engineering Practice : A Ten Year Journey of Requirements Inspection Systems Design Methodology (RISDM)","authors":"Shinobu Saito, M. Aoyama","doi":"10.1109/RE51729.2021.00039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE51729.2021.00039","url":null,"abstract":"This paper reflects on a decade-long journey into the industrial practices developed for requirements inspection in the Japanese software industry; it proposes an ELFIEP (Evolutionary Lifecycle Framework for Industrial Engineering Practice). We published two papers in RE’13 and RE’14. The first paper introduced the industrial practice of SRS (Software Requirements Specifications) inspection system of a software company. The system is a set of inspection items: inspection processes, techniques, and supporting tools. In the second paper, to encourage wider industrial adoption of requirements inspection systems, we proposed a methodology for designing requirements inspection systems. Called RISDM (Requirements Inspection System Design Methodology), it has been recognized by professional communities in Japan. A number of software companies have adopted the methodology, and are now operating their individual inspection systems. This paper provides a retrospect of the journey to RISDM. Learning from the journey, we propose ELFIEP as a generic framework for the evolution of engineering practice, and discuss insights gained from the journey and the framework.","PeriodicalId":440285,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123693537","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Aya Zaki-Ismail, Mohamed Osama, Mohamed Abdelrazek, J. Grundy, Amani S. Ibrahim
{"title":"ARF: Automatic Requirements Formalisation Tool","authors":"Aya Zaki-Ismail, Mohamed Osama, Mohamed Abdelrazek, J. Grundy, Amani S. Ibrahim","doi":"10.1109/RE51729.2021.00060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE51729.2021.00060","url":null,"abstract":"Formal verification techniques enable the detection of complex quality issues within system specifications. However, the majority of system requirements are usually specified in natural language (NL). Manual formalisation of NL requirements is an error-prone and labour-intensive process requiring strong mathematical expertise, and can be infeasible for large numbers of requirements. Existing automatic formalisation techniques usually support heavily constrained natural language relying on requirement boilerplates or templates. In this paper, we introduce ARF: Automatic Requirements Formalisation Tool. ARF can automatically transform free-format natural language requirements into temporal logic based formal notations. This is achieved through two steps: 1) extraction of key requirement attributes into an intermediate representation (RCM: Requirement Capturing Model), and 2) transformation rules that convert requirements from the RCM format to formal notations.","PeriodicalId":440285,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126694243","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}