META-MODELING CONSTRUCTS FOR REQUIREMENTS REUSE (RR): SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS PATTERNS, VARIABILITY AND TRACEABILITY

Reuse is a fundamental activity, which increases quality and productivity of software products. Reuse of software artifacts, such as requirements, architectures, and codes can be employed at any developmental stage of software. However, reuse at a higher level of abstraction, for instance at requirements level, provides greater benefits in software development than when applied at lower level of abstraction for example at coding level. To achieve full benefits of reuse, a systematic approach and appropriate strategy need to be followed. Although several reuse approaches are reported in the literature, these approaches lack a key strategy to synergize some essential drivers of reuse, which include reusable structure, variability management (VM) and traceability of software artifacts. In line with this, we make our contribution in this paper by (1) presenting the concepts and importance of software requirements patterns (SRP) for reusable structure; (2) proposing a strategy, which combines three sub-disciplines of Software Engineering (SE) such as Requirements Engineering (RE), Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) and Model-driven Engineering (MDE); (3) proposing a meta-modeling constructs, which include SRP, VM and traceability and; (4) Relationship amongst the three sub-disciplines of the SE. This is a novel approach and we believe it can support and guide researchers and practitioners in SE community to have greater benefits of reuse during software developments.

Brief report on the laboratory archaeology of the tomb M1 at Dahekou

In 2007, Shanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology conducted excavation to the Dahekou Cemetery of the Western Zhou Dynasty in Yicheng County. In the excavated M1, the wooden parts of the lacquered wares have decayed away and were very difficult to recover and process suitably in the fieldwork condition. Because of this, Conservation and Research Center for Cultural Heritage of the Institute of Archaeology, CASS was invited to conduct laboratory archaeology to these artifacts. By the onsite preservation and reinforcing processing and entire encasing acquisition, these artifacts and their burial context were removed to the laboratory and subject to recovery. The suitable propping materials and reinforcing reagents were selected to comprehensively process and conserve. These methods provided technological standards for the processing and preservation of the lacquered wooden objects unearthed from the semiarid areas; the completion of this project also clarified the characteristics, requirements, patterns and workflow of the laboratory archaeology.

A Structured Method for Security Requirements Elicitation Concerning the Cloud Computing Domain

Cloud computing systems offer an attractive alternative to traditional IT-systems, because of economic benefits that arise from the cloud's scalable and flexible IT-resources. The benefits are of particular interest for SME's. The reason is that using Cloud Resources allows an SME to focus on its core business rather than on IT-resources. However, numerous concerns about the security of cloud computing services exist. Potential cloud customers have to be confident that the cloud services they acquire are secure for them to use. Therefore, they have to have a clear set of security requirements covering their security needs. Eliciting these requirements is a difficult task, because of the amount of stakeholders and technical components to consider in a cloud environment. Therefore, the authors propose a structured, pattern-based method supporting eliciting security requirements and selecting security measures. The method guides potential cloud customers to model the application of their business case in a cloud computing context using a pattern-based approach. Thus, a potential cloud customer can instantiate our so-called Cloud System Analysis Pattern. Then, the information of the instantiated pattern can be used to fill-out our textual security requirements patterns and individual defined security requirement patterns, as well. The presented method is tool-supported. Our tool supports the instantiation of the cloud system analysis pattern and automatically transfers the information from the instance to the security requirements patterns. In addition, they have validation conditions that check e.g., if a security requirement refers to at least one element in the cloud. The authors illustrate their method using an online-banking system as running example.