Context. Requirements engineering is a discipline with numerous challenges to overcome. One of these challenges is the implementation of requirements reuse approaches. Although several theoretical proposals exist, little is known about the practices that are currently adopted in industry. Objective. Our goal is to contribute to the investigation of the state of the practice in the reuse of requirements, eliciting current practices from practitioners, and their opinions whenever appropriate. Besides reuse in general, we focus on requirement patterns as a particular strategy to reuse. Method. We conducted an exploratory survey based on an online questionnaire. We received 71 responses from requirements engineers with industrial experience in the field, which were analyzed in order to derive observations. Results. Although we found that a high majority of respondents declared some level of reuse in their projects (in particular, non-functional requirements were identified as the most similar and recurrent among projects), it is true that only a minority of them declared such reuse as a regular practice. Larger IT organizations and IT organizations with well-established software processes and methods present higher levels of reuse. Ignorance of reuse techniques and processes is the main reason preventing wider adoption. From the different existing reuse techniques, the simplest ones based on textual copy and subsequent tailoring of former requirements are the most adopted techniques. However, participants who apply reuse more often tend to use more elaborate techniques. Opinions of respondents about the use of requirement patterns show that they can be expected to mitigate problems related to the quality of the resulting requirements, such as lack of uniformity, inconsistency, or ambiguity. The main reasons behind the lack of adoption of requirement patterns by practitioners (in spite of the increasing research approaches proposed in the community) are related to the lack of a well-defined reuse method and involvement of requirement engineers. 2 Conclusion. The results of our paper are interesting for practitioners since we highlight relevant observations from the survey participants' experiences when deciding to implement requirements reuse practices. We also suggest future lines of research based on the needs pointed out in the results.

Selection of commercial-off-the-shelf software components (COTS components)

Abstract. [Context and motivation]Software Requirement Patterns (SRP) are a type of artifact that may be used during requirements elicitation that also impact positively in other activities like documentation and validation. In our experiences, SRP show a great percentage of reuse for the non-functional requirements needed in call-for-tender requirement specifications. [Question / problem] We are facing the need of formulating the accurate definition of SRP for their use in call-for-tender processes to allow reasoning rigorously and know more about their semantics and applicability. [Principal ideas / results] In this paper we present a metamodel for SRP around three main concepts: 1) the structure of SRP themselves; 2) the relationships among them; 3) the classification criteria for grouping them.[Contribution] We provide a rigorous definition that shows the concepts that are of interest when defining and applying SRP.

oftware component selection 1 is growing in importance. Its success relies on correctly assessing the candidate components' quality. For a particular project, you can assess quality by identifying and analyzing the criteria that affect it.

In this paper we propose a taxonomy for classifying COTS business applications, i.e. products that are used in the daily functioning of all types of organizations worldwide, such as ERP systems and document management tools. We propose the identification of characterization attributes to arrange the domains which these products belong to, and also we group these domains into categories. We define questions and answers as a means for browsing the taxonomy during COTS selection. We show the need of identifying and recording the relationships among the domains and propose the use of actor-oriented models for expressing these relationships as dependencies. Last, we explore the definition of quality models for the domains, to be used in COTS selection, focusing on their reusability and stepwise definition downwards the hierarchy. Category C1

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Abstract

Software requirement patterns have been proposed as an artifact for fostering requirements reuse. When we define these patterns for the functional part of a software system, we realize that most of patterns are specific of a software domain. This paper presents and analyzes a catalogue of functional software requirement patterns for the domain of content management, and gives an overview of how this catalogue has been constructed from the systematic analysis of 6 existing software specification documents with the support of expert assessment.