Towards ubiquitous requirements engineering through recommendations based on context histories

The growing technological advance is causing constant business changes. The continual uncertainties in project management make requirements engineering essential to ensure the success of projects. The usual exponential increase of stakeholders throughout the project suggests the application of intelligent tools to assist requirements engineers. Therefore, this article proposes Nhatos, a computational model for ubiquitous requirements management that analyses context histories of projects to recommend reusable requirements. The scientific contribution of this study is the use of the similarity analysis of projects through their context histories to generate the requirement recommendations. The implementation of a prototype allowed to evaluate the proposal through a case study based on real scenarios from the industry. One hundred fifty-three software projects from a large bank institution generated context histories used in the recommendations. The experiment demonstrated that the model achieved more than 70% stakeholder acceptance of the recommendations.

Adapting a Requirements Engineering Process by Key Factors Estimation

Literature mainly focuses the adaptation of any requirements engineering process on the possible variations of elicitation techniques, mainly due to information sources characteristics. However, these particularities, usually called situational factors, are seldom considered in other activities of the requirements process. Most situational factors, when considered in software projects, have a high influence on the requirements process. Therefore, the different situations that may attempt against or may favor a successful requirements process should be identified at the beginning of the project. Additionally, some of such factors may evolve along software development life cycle; this should motivate a reengineering of the requirements process at some strategic milestones. In this chapter, a process for constructing and dynamically adapting a requirements process is proposed, focusing on the evolving factors. The process follows rules based on different combinations of situational factors at specific control points and manages a repository of process blocks to perform the tailoring.

Requirements on Dimensions for a Maturity Model for Smart Grids Based on Two Case Studies

This contribution describes two different types of requirements engineering analysis of the necessary dimensions of a possible maturity model for Smart Grids to be implemented for utilities. For the first case study, the requirements engineering for necessary dimensions for a Smart Grid maturity model was elicited using a systematic literature research. On the contrary a more agile approach is used for the second requirements engineering. For this more agile approach, interviews with energy suppliers were conducted, taking into account the analysis of the literature research. Various energy suppliers from Germany took part in the survey. The results were used to develop the basic framework for a maturity model for Smart Grids, which can still be tailored if necessary. Finally, future research activities for the application and further development of maturity models for Smart Grids in the energy industry are explained as well as the different procedural variants in the requirements analysis.