Traceability of requirements and software architecture for change management

Journal of Systems and Software

Kurtev²,

Berg

2014

Please cite this article in press as: Goknil, A., et al., Generation and validation of traces between requirements and architecture based on formal trace semantics. J. Syst. Software (2013) The size and complexity of software systems make integration of the new/modified requirements to the software system costly and time consuming. The impact of requirements changes on other requirements, design elements and source code should be traced to determine parts of the software to be changed. Considerable research has been devoted to relating requirements and design artifacts with source code. Less attention has been paid to relating requirements (R) with architecture (A) by using well-defined semantics of traces. Traces between R&A might be manually assigned. This is time-consuming, and error prone. Traces might be incomplete and invalid. In this paper, we present an approach for automatic trace generation and validation of traces between requirements (R) and architecture (A). Requirements relations and architecture verification techniques are used. A trace metamodel is defined with commonly used trace types between R&A. We use the semantics of traces and requirements relations for generating and validating traces with a tool support. The tool provides the following: (1) generation and validation of traces by using requirements relations and/or verification of architecture, (2) generation and validation of requirements relations by using traces. The tool is based on model transformation in ATL and termrewriting logic in Maude.

Section: Definition 4 Contains Relationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Generation and validation of traces between requirements and architecture based on formal trace semantics

Journal of Systems and Software

Kurtev²,

Berg

2014

“…TRIC (Tool for Requirements Inferencing and Consistency checking) works on models that explicitly represent requirements and the relations among them. Five requirements relation types (requires, refines, partially refines, contains, and conflicts) are supported and formally defined in First-Order Logic [10] [11]. The formal semantics of the relations is used to determine if a change in a requirement has an impact on related requirements.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Experimental evaluation of a tool for change impact prediction in requirements models: Design, results, and lessons learned

2014 IEEE 4th International Model-Driven Requirements Engineering Workshop (MoDRE)

Domburg

Kurtev

et al. 2014

Abstract-There are commercial tools like IBM Rational RequisitePro and DOORS that support semi-automatic change impact analysis for requirements. These tools capture the requirements relations and allow tracing the paths they form. In most of these tools, relation types do not say anything about the meaning of the relations except the direction. When a change is introduced to a requirement, the requirements engineer analyzes the impact of the change in related requirements. In case semantic information is missing to determine precisely how requirements are related to each other, the requirements engineer generally has to assume the worst case dependencies based on the available syntactic information only. We developed a tool that uses formal semantics of requirements relations to support change impact analysis and prediction in requirements models. The tool TRIC (Tool for Requirements Inferencing and Consistency checking) works on models that explicitly represent requirements and the relations among them with their formal semantics. In this paper we report on the evaluation of how TRIC improves the quality of change impact predictions. A quasiexperiment is systematically designed and executed to empirically validate the impact of TRIC. We conduct the quasi-experiment with 21 master's degree students predicting change impact for five change scenarios in a real software requirements specification. The participants are assigned with Microsoft Excel, IBM RequisitePro or TRIC to perform change impact prediction for the change scenarios. It is hypothesized that using TRIC would positively impact the quality of change impact predictions. Two formal hypotheses are developed. As a result of the experiment, we are not able to reject the null hypotheses, and thus we are not able to show experimentally the effectiveness of our tool. In the paper we discuss reasons for the failure to reject the null hypotheses in the experiment.Index Terms-Requirements management tools, change impact analysis, requirements models.

“…Supplementary Material A 1 presents the formal semantics of requirements and relations. The reader is also referred to [32,38] for the formalization. Fig.…”

Section: Definitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The formal semantics of the change types and their rationale can be found in Supplementary Material B. 2 The reader is also referred to [32] for the formalization.…”

Section: Classification Of Changes In Requirementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Change impact analysis for requirements: A metamodeling approach

Information and Software Technology

Kurtev²,

Berg

et al. 2014

a b s t r a c tContext: Following the evolution of the business needs, the requirements of software systems change continuously and new requirements emerge frequently. Requirements documents are often textual artifacts with structure not explicitly given. When a change in a requirements document is introduced, the requirements engineer may have to manually analyze all the requirements for a single change. This may result in neglecting the actual impact of a change. Consequently, the cost of implementing a change may become several times higher than expected. Objective: In this paper, we aim at improving change impact analysis in requirements by using formal semantics of requirements relations and requirements change types. Method: In our previous work we present a requirements metamodel with commonly used requirements relation types and their semantics formalized in first-order logic. In this paper the classification of requirements changes based on structure of a textual requirement is provided with formal semantics. The formalization of requirements relations and changes is used for propagating proposed changes and consistency checking of proposed changes in requirements models. The tool support for change impact analysis in requirements models is an extension of our Tool for Requirements Inferencing and Consistency Checking (TRIC). Results: The described approach for change impact analysis helps in the elimination of some false positive impacts in change propagation, and enables consistency checking of changes. Conclusion: We illustrate our approach in an example which shows that the formal semantics of requirements relations and change classification enables change alternatives to be proposed semi-automatically, the reduction of some false positive impacts and contradicting changes in requirements to be determined.