RISE-REQCOMP subproject

Integrational Specification and Management of Requirements

Requirements can be regarded as an aspect of a system to which other aspects, such as design, implementation, or test aspects must be related. Sometimes the trace from requirements to final realisation is straightforward; sometimes it is very complicated.

The hypothesis for RISE-REQCOMP is that traceability from requirements to design is easier to establish and maintain if modern design concepts, such as aspects, are used. We have a special interest in Non-Functional Requirements, that are often handled implicitly in industrial practice and in newly proposed development models, such as the Rational Unified Process. The potential benefits from good traceability are:

The requirements can be said to represent the intended use of the system, but in order to manage the software product we need data about the actual use of the system. We regard the usage profile as another aspect of the system, which can be expressed in terms of the requirements, annotated with data about the frequency of execution. The usage data gives us valuable information for:

Subproject members

Kristian Sandahl, subproject leader
Andreas Borg , PhD student

Subproject description

The leading star for this research is to work with industrially relevant problems, and have a critical attitude to the hypotheses we state at the university.. Thus we are performing case studies with industrial partners in order to achieve problem definitions and to test solutions. The strategy is to start with a general description of requirements management and then subsequently go into more detail. The general goal is to achieve models of describing requirements that are both capable of handling models of realistic sizes as well as being integrateable with the design concepts developed in RISE-ARE. This work is interweaved with critical examination of the benefits sketched above.

Subproject plan

Subproject status

Publications

Acknowledgment

We are indebted to Ericsson, SMHI and Focal Point AB. Part of this project was financed by KK-stiftelsens företagsforksarskola, LIFT.

This subproject is part of the RISE project at PELAB, IDA, Linköpings universitet, and supported by SSF.




Kristian Sandahl (krs@ida.liu.se)