Eliciting and prioritizing quality requirements supported by ontologies: a case study using the ElicitO framework and tool

Abstract

As software complexity grows and clients demand higher quality software, quality requirements can no longer be considered to be of secondary importance. Thus, eliciting, specifying, prioritizing and validating quality requirements is a prerequisite to the development of effective and efficient information systems. Despite the critical importance of quality requirements, there is a considerable gap in the breadth and depth of quality requirements engineering (RE) support in most RE approaches. In practice, it is often the case to have quality requirements considered as an afterthought in the systems development process. While there is a wealth of modelling techniques and tools for functional requirements, there is very limited support for quality requirements in RE. Support for quality requirements is usually ad‐hoc, without clear guidelines on how to capture, specify and manage quality requirements and also without proper usage of standardized terminologies based on established quality models such as the ISO/IEC 9126 quality model. In this paper, we discuss a quality‐driven RE framework and tool that applies knowledge management techniques and quality ontologies to support RE activities. The ontology implements the quality characteristics and metrics prescribed by the ISO/9126 quality model, providing a common vocabulary to address quality concerns/aspects across RE activities. We empirically validate how the framework and tool can be used to effectively support the requirements elicitation and prioritization activities through a case study addressing the development of an intranet portal project at the University of Manchester.

SCRAM–CK: applying a collaborative requirements engineering process for designing a web based e-science toolkit

“…This is an alternative to the approaches that promote determining the NFR after the functional requirements are defined [19,33]. In this case using an ontology based NFR elicitation framework, such as ElicitO [1], in combination with SCRAM-CK could provide a more complete set of requirements. This would be an important enhancement with the potential of easing the transition from prototyping to development of high quality production applications.…”

Unstructured source artifacts ontology for requirement validation in GDSD

“…As discussed in previous section, specifically related to requirement validation work [13,14,15,16] indicated the progress in field of validation, some are converting requirement into formal model for purposes of validation, other are using formal model and traceability, yet issues involves are again lot of human effort and minimum accuracy. A few work highlighted the ontological solution here [1,9] but an again pre-mature model, however no work is addressing requirement validation issues in GDD environment.…”

“…However any deviation from customer needs create defective software project that cannot be validated in it operational environment [18,29]. This propagation of defects into later phase of software development results in major cost impact as statistics shows that requirements contribution due to validations defect are proportionally high; however improving these defects play a significant role in success of software projects [9].…”

An ontology to document a quality scheme specification of a software product

“…The use of ontologies to support different aspects of software engineering has increase in the last years. A lot of the research work done refers to the elicitation process (Al Balushi, Sampaio, & Loucopoulos, ; Couto, Ribeiro, & Campos, ; Jwo & Cheng, ; Pires et al, ) and to the specification of ontologies for intermediate products (Abebe & Tonella, ; De Graaf, Liang, Tang, Van Hage, & Van Vliet, ). Other works focus on the development of tools based on ontologies that help to support the development process (García‐Peñalvo, Colomo‐Palacios, García, & Therón, ; Henderson‐Sellers, ; Reinhartz‐Berger, Sturm, & Wand, ).…”