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Today, when undertaking requirements elicitation, engineers attend to the needs and wants of the user groups considered relevant for the software system. However, answers to some relevant questions (e.g., how to improve adoption of the intended system) cannot always be addressed through direct need and want elicitation. Using an example of energy demand-response systems, this paper demonstrates that use of grounded theory analysis can help address such questions. The theories emerging from such analysis produce a set of additional requirements which cannot be directly elicited from individuals/groups, and would otherwise be missed. Thus, we demonstrate that the theories generated through grounded theory analysis can serve as additional valuable sources of requirements for software and its wider system. This paper extends our previous work by demonstrating how several theories can be constructed and utilised for a single system analysis.

Cloud service selection (CSS) remains a strategically significant decision and has a substantial impact on an organization’s competitive edge. Despite considerable research, the literature lacks a comprehensive unified approach to consensual CSS. Recognizing the significance of CSS decisions, in this paper, we propose a novel Cloud Service Scrutinization and Selection Framework (C3SF) that includes four interdependent phases: (1) requirements elicitation, (2) scrutinization, (3) evaluation, and (4) ranking & selection. As part of C3SF, we use conjunctive screening to scrutinize cloud services. We also propose a novel multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach called the modified Best-Worst Method (MBWM), which computes the weights of criteria using early-stage consensus among decision-makers. In addition, we introduce an innovative two-step consensus process for ranking services using leading MCDM methods followed by an aggregation of ranks using a Markov chain-based approach. Moreover, to develop a broader consensus, we propose another two-stage novel mechanism comprising multi-aggregation and synthesis/fusion of rank information using a partially ordered set. We validate the performance and effectiveness of C3SF through a CSS case study using real-world data followed by a comprehensive analysis. The results show that C3SF is robust, practical, and suitable for well-informed decision-making.

Design success mostly depends on understanding and realising product requirements, which are nested with different levels of stakeholders and specific market demands. Emerging markets are volatile and non-linear for understanding user-specific needs, particularly related to aircraft design. We attempt herein to elicit specific requirements through a proposed requirements elicitation process based on functional, physical and behavioural viewpoints. An evaluation of those critical requirements is also performed through Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to reveal the fitness of the customer requirements (raw requirements) in relation to the technical measures. After selecting all projected potential users, a Systems Modelling Language (SysML) use-case diagram is also summarised to illustrate the user’s relation to the system functions. Some raw requirements are verified through constraint analysis and cost examination as an exemplary approach to present the transformation from raw to final requirements. The data are collected and analysed to construct the aircraft’s key specifications. Most importantly, how to identify good requirements that define the needs, attainability, clarity and verifiability is demonstrated.In addition, it is demonstrated through this study that there is a need of a specific type of general aviation aircraft that may fulfil the unique demands of emerging economies by satisfying their socio-economic conditions.

Digital transformation stimulates continuous generation of large amounts of digital data, both in organizations and in society at large. As a consequence, there have been growing efforts in the Requirements Engineering community to consider digital data as sources for requirements acquisition, in addition to human stakeholders. The volume, velocity and variety of the data make requirements discovery increasingly dynamic, but also unstructured and complex, which current elicitation methods are unable to consider and manage in a systematic and efficient manner. We propose a framework, in the form of a conceptual metamodel and a method, for continuous and automated acquisition, analysis and aggregation of heterogeneous digital sources that aims to support data-driven requirements elicitation and management. The usability of the framework is partially validated by an in-depth case study from the business sector of video game development.

We propose a method to collect data on user requirements of medical equipment shared by different users and services, relate those requirements with the equipment's technical features, and rank the most important features to be considered when procuring the equipment, leading to more effective procurement decision making. Our method is structured in three phases: (i) elicit the device's technical characteristics, (ii) determine user requirements, and (iii) relate technical characteristics to user requirements. The method is applied to rank the most relevant features of a hospital recliner used by seven services and three types of users. Our results indicate the 10 most relevant factors (requirements) for an “ideal” hospital recliner with potential impact on outputs (importance scores). A final list of 32 items was useful for comparing user requirements and identifying key features that address the most relevant requirements. User-centered approaches to requirements elicitation in medical equipment procurement promote healthcare benefits, safety, and end-user satisfaction. Potential use of our approach goes beyond our application case study into many other categories of procurement decisions and into other industry and business applications, wherever multiple stakeholders' requirements should be considered in decisions with multiple value dimensions of value.

Software requirements prioritization and selection is an important activity of the requirements elicitation process. The objective of this process is to prioritize the software requirements so that...

Software requirements prioritization (SRP) is one of the key activities of the requirements elicitation process in which several decision makers are involved for the evaluation of the software requirements (SRs) based on various criteria. Different fuzzy based methods have been developed to compute the ranking values of the SRs. In these methods different types of membership functions are employed to model the linguistic variables. It is hard to decide the boundary of the fuzzy set accurately because membership functions are selected on the basis of subjective judgement. The fuzzy based methods may affect the ranking order of the SRs because it focuses on subjectivity and lacks objectivity. To address this issue, we present a method for the prioritization of SRs using rough set theory. The applicability of the proposed method is explained using the examination system of an educational institute. Based on our analysis we find that the proposed method captures the exact opinion of the decision makers during the SRP process and no prior information is needed to compute the ranking values of the SRs.

It is of vital importance to explore and understand future users' needs and requirements in the early phases of the product development process. However, in times of social distancing meeting users might not be possible. The project reported on in this paper has investigated the possibilities of conducting advanced user studies online. In total 30 small experimental studies have been conducted. Common digital tools that were used were e.g. Zoom, Teams, Mural, Miro, Snapchat, and Instagram.The data was analyzed in a thematic content analysis by the authors on Mural. Identified challenges were excluding not tech-savvy user groups, missing out on interpersonal interaction and observations, as well as difficulties creating participant commitment and trust. On the positive side were perceived efficiency, a more levelled power distribution between participants, and ease of engagement and data retrieval for tech-savvy users.Identified best practices included lowering social barriers through warm up activities and techniques to support open discussion during workshops. Furthermore, engagement could be supported through private social media groups, regular reminders, as well as clear communication of purpose and goal of the activities.

Software safety requirements are crucial for safety assurance of safety-critical software systems. A novel accident causality model, Systems-theoretic accident modeling and processes (STAMP), has been proposed to overcome the limitations of traditional safety techniques in software safety requirements elicitation. However, the STAMP-based method is ad-hoc with no rigorous procedure to elicit software safety requirements effectively. Furthermore, the time-related safety requirements, which are important to software safety, have been paid little attention in STAMP-based method. With the purpose of overcoming these limitations, this paper strives to find a systematic approach to elicit software safety requirements with STAMP, especially the time-related safety requirements. Firstly, a new process model of STAMP is proposed to model all the system varilables and the ralationship of them in control processes. Then based on the process model, an approach HCAT-SSRA is proposed to elicit the software safety requirements by building Hazardous control action tree (HCAT) for each control action in system control processes. Additionally, several rules are proposed to guide time-related software safety requirements analysis. Finally, a case study is given to illustrate the availability and feasibility of the proposed method.

The common view of requirements engineering consists of requirement elicitation, specification, validation, and evolution. Requirement elicitation is a significant stage to assure the quality of the requirement documentations and would affect the project success or failure. There are different techniques to elicit the requirements. Each technique has its advantages and disadvantages. Thus, it is important to adopt more than one kind of technique to describe a system clearly from different viewpoints. This study prospected some of the research papers in the same field to display the requirements elicitation techniques that are used in developing mobile applications from a variety of research disciplines. It suggests some requirements elicitation concepts to guide software engineers in selecting the techniques according to customers' needs and to show the common challenges that they face.

To (semi-)automatically classify user needs that are collected from online open sources, we propose the Open Innovation in Requirements Engineering (OIRE) method. OIRE is mimicking the well-known Kano model exclusively using data from online reviews instead of conducting interviews with select focus groups. In our previous research, we introduced the design, implementation and preliminary validation of the applicability of the OIRE method. In this article, we introduce the tool support for the OIRE method, OIRE-System (OIRE-S), and evaluate the usefulness of the OIRE method using OIRE-S in an industry setting. For that purpose, we conducted one case study with two Chinese companies that plan to have software apps developed by suppliers. In addition, we conducted interviews about the case study with two addition stakeholders. Based on the analysis results of the case study and the interview study, we conclude that the OIRE method provides helpful information for stakeholders and, thus, is useful to decision-makers in industry, in particular as a complement to existing requirements elicitation and analysis activities.

Software engineers make use of several computational architectures (CA) to host an application, such as desktop, web, and cloud computing architectures. As the requirements vary according to the desired CA, developers may face two problems: determining which requirement better fulfills a CA and determining which CA fulfills a given set of requirements. This paper presents a new approach based on the Cost-Value Approach (CVA). We have slightly modified the CVA method (SCVA method) and also developed a new method for choosing the most appropriate CA (MMACA method). Our results provide a set of requirements ordered by priority for each CA. Finally, we discuss the current and most appropriate CA for a real project solution.

Requirements elicitation is activities aimed at finding the needs of a system through communication with system users. The purpose of requirements elicitation is to find out what problems have been encountered. User persona is a fictional representation of the ideal user. The software developer will begin the design process by conducting user research, establishing communication with the target user and identifying exactly what they need with the product to be made. Personas are generally based on these users and combine the needs, goals, and behavior patterns observed from the target audience. This study aims to determine information systems related to the characteristics and needs of users of the software, so that the data generated in the form of qualitative data from prospective users. By using the hypotheses that are made, which will later be analyzed and used as a basis for developing projects. The results of this study are information in accordance with user needs that will be implemented using a use case and software prototype.

Requirements elicitation is an initial phase in software development. In this phase, requirements engineers gather the requirements of the software under development from users, stakeholders and customers. The techniques used for gathering requirements have a big influence on the quality of requirements and the success of project. Many requirements elicitation techniques (RET) such as: interview, prototype and observation can be used for requirements gathering process. However, one technique is not suitable for all different projects. Usually requirement engineers select the RET based on personal preferences and assumptions such as; this is the only technique which they know. However, this subjective decision can result in using inappropriate RET. Using unsuitable RET may decrease the quality of elicited requirements. Even though researchers have proposed many techniques for elicitation, one of the challenging issues is to choose the suitable RET for specific situations. The purpose of this paper is to help requirement engineers to choose suitable RET. To do that firstly, we identify factors that affect in selecting RET. Secondly, an approach to select suitable RET is proposed. Thirdly, a prototype is developed to help requirements engineers and to ease the process of selectingelicitation technique. Lastly, experts evaluate the proposed approach and the prototype.

The requirements engineering of Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems is extremely challenging due to large system sizes, component heterogeneity, involvement of multi-discipline stakeholders and machines, and continuous evolution. Formal and semi-formal languages, techniques, tools and frameworks can assist by providing repeatable and rigorous structures for eliciting, specifying, analysing, verifying and maintaining requirements. Various approaches have been proposed, but a contemporary and comprehensive study providing a landscape of the state-of-the-art is currently missing. This article reports a systematic mapping study covering 93 primary studies published between 2009 and October 2020. We categorise surveyed studies by current research directions in the use of semi-formal and formal methods for Requirements Engineering phases for Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems. We also identify gaps in current research and develop a novel conceptual model capturing the relationship between available formalisms and Requirements Engineering activities. We find that extensive work has been carried out on the formal analysis and verification of safety and timings requirements. However, the use of semi-formal notations, works on key phases like requirements elicitation and management, and the adoption of industrial standards are largely missing. Moreover, we find no literature providing methods to handle privacy and trust requirements, which have become critical concerns in this area.

The literature shows disparities in how fundamental systems engineering concepts in the area of requirements engineering, such as stakeholder needs, system requirements, requirements elicitation, requirements derivation, and requirements decomposition, are used within the communities‐of‐practice and in research. Such disparities can lead to conceptual and application inconsistencies, which have been shown to contribute to the formulation of poor requirements. In this paper, such concepts are articulated using systems theory as the underlying theoretical framework. The concepts of problem space, solution space, open system, and closed system are central to this work. It is argued that the proposed articulations facilitate avoiding usage disparity, ultimately resulting in better formulation of requirements. These articulations are supported by in‐depth examples that comprehensively cover different types of needs and requirements, and provide step‐by‐step insights into how elicitation, derivation, and decomposition occur within a problem formulation effort.

Product-Service System (PSS) models offer an integrated service solution to create value for businesses. In the high-value manufacturing sector, value creation for maintaining market competitiveness and improving customer satisfaction is a challenging task. Designing an effective PSS solution depends on integrated service, and product requirements and constraints. Thereby, PSS contract decisions can be significantly influenced by customers’ requirements, and also product and service features. However, existing literature primarily focuses on the impact of service requirements on the PSS contract decisions. Moreover, the existing insights for PSS customization mainly consider hysteretic customer requirements rather than forecasting the requirements under product and service uncertainties. In this paper, an agent-based cost-benefit analysis simulation model is implemented for the PSS contract decisions context. Moreover, a sensitivity analysis is conducted on service costs. Additionally, the effect of product remaining life on service contract decisions is analyzed. The simulation model considers stochastic uncertainty to study PSS contracts customization. The presented model supports PSS customization process by providing a quantitative tool that measures contracts’ profitability as early as the requirement elicitation phase. Furthermore, the bottom-up nature of the model, and the integration of probabilistic uncertainties enhance the flexibility of PSS customization. A case study of PSS contract decision in the machine tool industry is considered for assessing the validity of the presented model. Studies on different forms of service uncertainty highlight that the product failure rate has the most influence on the profitability of a service contract. Moreover, the impact of product age on profitability in an availability-based contract is more significant compared to a spare-parts contract.

Requirements elicitation is a fundamental phase of software development in which an analyst discovers the needs of different stakeholders and transforms them into requirements This phase is cost- and time-intensive, and a project may fail if there are excessive costs and schedule overruns COVID-19 has affected the software industry by reducing interactions between developers and customers Such a lack of interaction is a key reason for the failure of software projects Projects can also fail when customers do not know precisely what they want Furthermore, selecting the unsuitable elicitation technique can also cause project failure The present study, therefore, aimed to identify which requirements elicitation technique is the most cost-effective for large-scale projects when time to market is a critical issue or when the customer is not available To that end, we conducted a systematic literature review on requirements elicitation techniques Most primary studies identified introspection as the best technique, followed by survey and brainstorming This finding suggests that introspection should be the first choice of elicitation technique, especially when the customer is not available or the project has strict time and cost constraints Moreover, introspection should also be used as the starting point in the elicitation process of a large-scale project, and all known requirements should be elicited using this technique

Fehler bei der Inbetriebnahme von Maschinen und Anlagen sind kostspielig und zeitintensiv. Dabei steigen die Kosten mit dem Voranschreiten des Entwicklungsprozesses stark an. Um Missverständnisse oder Planungsfehler zu minimieren, bevor diese hohe Kosten verursachen, wird ein intelligentes Assistenzsystem beschrieben, das die Vorstellungen, Ziele und Mittel des Kunden auf einfache Weise erfasst und auftretende Probleme oder Unklarheiten reaktiv korrigiert. Der Maschinen- und Anlagenhersteller profitiert dabei von einer automatisch erstellten, einheitlichen Dokumentation der Kundenanforderungen. Errors during commissioning of machines and plants are costly and time intensive. The costs grow higher with every step of the development process. To minimize misunderstandings and planning errors during the requirements phase, an intelligent assistance system is being introduced which acquires the ideas, goals and resources of a customer in a simple manner and reactively corrects arising problems or ambiguities. The machine and plant manufacturer profits from the uniform documentation of customer requirements.

Implementing machine learning in an enterprise involves tackling a wide range of complexities with respect to requirements elicitation, design, development, and deployment of such solutions. Despite the necessity and relevance of requirements engineering approaches to the process, not much research has been done in this area. This paper employs a case study method to evaluate the expressiveness and usefulness of GR4ML, a conceptual modeling framework for requirements elicitation, design, and development of machine learning solutions. Our results confirm that the framework includes an adequate set of concepts for expressing machine learning requirements and solution design. The case study also demonstrates that the framework can be useful in machine learning projects by revealing new requirements that would have been missed without using the framework, as well as, by facilitating communication among project team members of different roles and backgrounds. Feedback from study participants and areas of improvement to the framework are also discussed.

Designing games to encourage players' positive and healthy behaviors is both a necessity and a challenge. Although the game research field has relevant contributions in literature, especially regarding gamification, serious games and persuasive computing, when the application domain is critical, such as education or health, it is necessary to understand the context in which a game will be inserted before actually proposing and designing it. This paper presents a collaborative workshop for problem understanding and requirements elicitation in the early stages of game design. The workshop stresses the importance of problem-understanding from a sociotechnical perspective before developing a game and before directly engaging other stakeholders. The paper presents the workshop in practice where designers must understand how to support children to perform speech therapy exercises outside hospital settings. The workshop was conducted to produce a systemic understanding of the problem domain, of human and technical aspects, possible solutions and their implications to be used as inputs for game design and evaluation. The paper presents the workshop and its main results, discussing lessons learned and highlighting the need for early and lean practices to promote the socially aware design of games.

The development of systems with different features becomes increasingly challenging, given the actual context, implying on the search for new approaches for requirements elicitation. One of these approaches is design thinking (DT), a process of encouraging innovation used by designers, which presents itself as fundamental in the success of new products. This scenario motivates the importance of knowing DT concepts and their techniques, which can support requirements elicitation. In this context, the authors present DTA4RE (DT assistant for requirements elicitation), a tool that suggests DT techniques for requirements elicitation, which can be used by both students and professionals who would like to adopt DT in their projects. The DTA4RE is composed of a set of 27 techniques that could be suggested to the user through a recommendation questionnaire as well as an open repository with material to support the application of these techniques. Results from the authors’ two empirical studies with software engineering undergraduate and graduate students and industry professionals indicate that DTA4RE has helped in the selection of and in the learning of DT techniques when considering real problems. Most participants considered the questions from the recommendation questionnaire easy to answer, and the techniques suggested by the tool useful.

Online discussion forums can be used for reflecting on the overall user experience of a system. If a user forum is well-structured, it can be a valuable source of requirements-related information, which can potentially be accommodated in the requirements engineering process to enhance the current and future software. However, presently, there are limited approaches for extracting such requirements-related information from the relevant community forums. To fill this gap, this study proposes an automated approach, which automatically identifies requirements information using natural language processing and machine learning. For this purpose, the authors analysed 3319 user comments collected from the seven discussion topics in the Reddit forum. Then, using a content analysis approach, they studied how frequently end-users submit such information across each discussion topic. Also, they developed an automated approach that identifies key stakeholders, who frequently contribute his rationales in the forum discussion. Further, they employed different machine learning algorithms to classify user comments into rationale elements of different types. The authors' results show that online forums, such as Reddit, can be a rich source of requirements elicitation. Also, machine learning is a promising tool to detect user's rationale and identify different kinds of requirements modelling elements.

Future transport will change drastically with the introduction of automated vehicles. Here, Autonomous Mobility on Demand (AMoD) will play a major role, requiring a radical change of vehicle design, with many different conceivable concepts. This technology shift holds high potentials and high risks. Uncertainties about future usage profiles, operator and customer requirements have to be dealt with. An approach to elicit initial requirements for future vehicle concepts considering the entire ecosystem is introduced. The applicability is shown for a specific urban mobility scenario.

This paper presents a novel framework for improving project outcomes by ensuring that systems requirements can be verified and validated against project objectives and constraints. The multiattribute process ensures that each requirement makes a measurable contribution toward meeting a system's intended use while considering the impact of known constraints. This new framework aims to increase the likelihood of program success by identifying and valuing requirements in the early stages of a system's development. This research very explicitly extends previous research and aims to overcome complications that have persisted within the literature with regard to selecting and prioritizing system requirements. The authors present the first demonstration of applying analytic hierarchy process to prioritize requirements for a United States Navy Phased Array Radar and use a novel methodology for applying AHP's ratings approach to requirements prioritization.

Many of the software development projects are not successfully finished. In many cases, this is because the software requirements were not correctly identified. One of the factors that affect the elicitation of requirements is the proper selection of requirements elicitation techniques. Even when there is a lot of literature that proposes several requirements elicitation techniques, there is no reference process model that indicates the techniques that must be applied by a requirement's engineer to elicit the requirements of a mobile application for e-commerce. This gap covers both the elicitation of functional and non-functional requirements. Therefore, the authors propose a new model called reference process model for requirements elicitation for e-commerce mobile applications development (RPM-REFEMAD), which allows the elicitation of requirements based on the use of four elicitation techniques combined in ten steps. The proposed model was applied in the requirements elicitation of two e-commerce mobile applications in different scenarios. To visualise the results of the model, a survey was designed and applied to users/stakeholders who participated in the reference process model evaluation. The survey results indicated that RPM-REFEMAD model helps to elicit more quality and quantity functional and non-functional requirements, in comparison with the use of traditional requirements elicitation techniques.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the design principles to develop mobile applications for illiterate and semi-literate people and to design, develop, and evaluate a mobile application for illiterate and semi-literate people in Bangladesh using the revealed design principles and following a design science research approach. The authors first conducted a requirement elicitation study to reveal a set of design principals to make the user interface (UI) intuitive for illiterate and semi-literate people. Then, a mobile application (Chakuri-Bazaar) was developed following these design principals. Finally, the application was evaluated with 40 illiterate and semi-literate people through a field study. As outcome, a set of design principles was revealed for designing usable mobile application for illiterate and semi-literate people. The findings of the evaluation study suggest that the application was effective, efficient, and the users were satisfied in terms of its ease of use, ease of learning, willingness to use it in future, and willingness to recommend it to others.

Understanding of system requirements that satisfy end users’ needs is fundamental of system development, yet challenging when end users are unable to address their needs explicitly. Although a number of scholars have been designing and applying requirement elicitation techniques, there is a research gap in Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) with Web-based Geographical Information System (Web-GIS) in water resource management for disaster risk reduction. The gap addresses especially design elicitation techniques and their performances 1) to understand data types used for decision making, 2) set timing for sharing the data to accomplish end users’ tasks, and 3) compile the data to be represented so as to facilitate end users’ decision making. This study therefore designed a requirement elicitation technique by advancing User Story Mapping (USM) and validated through a workshop using mock-up system interface with potential end users who are in charge of water resource management in Myanmar’s Bago River Basin. Through the research it could be validated that the user stories-based approach enabled end users to decompose their operation activities into tasks. It also allowed them to link to necessary data with visual image for facilitating their task accomplishments and decision making for water resource management. It was revealed that the benefits of using the designed approach are not only just to summarize necessary data and information for end users’ decision making but also to encourage them to proactively consider data utilization into their operations. For further development of the requirement elicitation to understand end users needs, insights and recommendations for the proposed technique designing and conducting of the workshop were obtained.

Software development is the activity of creating a software system that when used, solves some unsolved problem. It consists many knowledge intensive processes, among which requirement elicitation process is perhaps the most critical for the success of the software system. The success or failure of the system is related to the quality of the elicitation process and to the method used for gathering user needs. This study examines combined approaches to identify and classify the requirements and investigates the importance of customer satisfaction in requirement elicitation for online bus reservation system. The context of this work is University Malaysia Pahang (UMP). The target audiences are public who uses bus services. A total 63 out of 70 questionnaire are answered by the people. To do this, the design of two types of questionnaires: conventional and Kano questionnaire is done and implemented to identify the correct requirements for the selected system and then to compare the effectiveness of these two approaches. This study found that, both conventional method and Kano model are suitable to find and classify the requirements, but for deeper understanding of requirements which have the greatest influence on the customer's satisfaction, Kano model is more effective, because Kano's method provides valuable help when trade-off is needed for designing the product development.

Design thinking (DT) has found its way into software engineering, promising better requirements elicitation, customer relations, and cohesion within the development team. We report on Proaction Technologies' migration toward DT and evaluate the process through interviews with employees and clients.

Grounded theory (GT), a widespread qualitative research methodology, has been introduced to generate a theory from data that is gathered from one discipline. However, in many studies, we are required to involve multiple disciplines and generate a theory that explains a multidisciplinary phenomenon and incorporate combined concepts. The combined concept is either a generalized concept from one of the disciplines or a new abstract concept that can satisfy the properties of multiple disciplines. The GT coding phases are not able to extract these combined concepts. In this paper, an extended GT has been proposed. The proposed method can operate over multiple disciplines and extract their corresponding combined concepts. The proposed extended grounded theory (EGT) uses ontology matching and merging methods to merge the extracted concepts and proposes two new coding phases; namely “Description” and “Combination” phases. These phases overcome the challenge of describing combined concepts, the large number of concept dependencies, and the propagation of the description changes from one concept to other concepts. As a use case, the proposed methodology has been implemented over two disciplines of “Web Security” and “Computation over Encrypted Data” and resulted in the unified theory of “Developing Secure Web Applications over Encrypted Data.” This unified theory includes combined concepts such as Web Access Control over encrypted data and Operation of middle-boxes over encrypted data. In addition, EGT has been able to discover new combined concepts that were undefined previously in each of the two disciplines (e.g. XSS prevention with searchable encryption). As a second case study, EGT has been implemented over two disciplines of “Healthcare” and “Data Science” to generate a unified theory that explains the multidisciplinary phenomenon of “Privacy Preservation of Cloud based Health Data”. In addition to a unified theory, EGT generates a conceptual framework of the combined and new concepts that can be used for requirement elicitation and analysis. Furthermore, the researcher can use the concepts’ relationships to suggest a set of best-fit solutions to the elicited requirements.

Enormous amount of text documents that contains requirements expressed in form of unstructured text are obtained in big software development projects and they have to be transformed into structured documents. Collecting requirements from such huge volume of informal text is still a key mission to be achieved. The majority of the software requirements data that are available to software engineers are articulated in form of Natural Language text and there is no formal grammar or specified syntax are followed by the customer for writing requirements i.e. they are highly unstructured. Manual requirements elicitation from these unstructured documents takes lot of time, it is also subject to errors and it is tedious to perform. Any deficiency in the process of gathering the requirements will lead to undesirable consequences that affects the software development. Requirements that are confusing and not complete in any aspect can collapse the software development project itself. We focus on developing an integrated framework towards automated software requirements elicitation from unstructured documents. A formal grammar based technique is developed to tackle the complex sentence structure, regular expression grammar rules that analyzes the linguistic elements in unstructured text are developed and applied to extract the core concepts/entities and relations between entities, the building blocks of any information system development. Another important task that contributes for automation is to build a domain ontology consisting of concepts, their attributes and relation between concepts and axioms, it extends guidance in the semantic labelling of the extracted information constructs. Since it is expensive to have a domain expert to be present all through the stages of software requirements elicitation, domain ontology serves as a background knowledge source. The extracted requirements after semantic association are then presented to the user in form of Object Role Model diagrams to obtain their consent. The framework provides an overall accuracy of 91% in terms of semantic mapping of the extracted requirements.

Risk-driven requirements elicitation represents an approach that allows assignment of appropriate countermeasure for the protection of the Information System (IS) depending on the risk level. Elicitation of safety requirements based on risk analysis is essential for those IS which will run on the open and dynamic Internet platform. Traditionally, misuse cases are used to find the weak points of an IS but cannot differentiate between the weak point that can lead to lenient hazard and/or serious hazard. In this paper, we present an enhanced misuse case approach to support IS safety risk assessment at the early stages of software process. We extensively examined and identified concepts which constitute a modelling technique for IS safety risk assessment and build a conceptual model for achieving IS safety risk assessment during the requirement analysis phase of software process. The risk assessment process follows an approach of consequential analysis based on misuse cases for safety hazard identification and qualitative risk measurement. The safety requirements are elicited according to the results of the risk assessment. A medical IS is used as a case study to validate the proposed model.

Nonfunctional requirements get less attention because functional requirements are considered more important in the domain of agile software methodologies. This is due to the lack of mature requirement elicitation methodologies and the nature of the software agile software development process. The less attention caused few solutions in the domain which lead to software project failure. Cloud computing helps to practice twelve (12) agile principles including nonfunctional requirement elicitation. This study proposed a semi-automated methodology which will help analyst and developers in eliciting nonfunctional requirements in agile development and cloud computing environment. The methodology used an NLP based automatic NFR extraction approach to fast the NFR elicitation process. The methodology is evaluated by applying on eProcurement dataset. The results are improved by 8.77% and 1.76% in terms of “Successful” NFR. It is decreased by 7.02% and 1.75% in term of “Partial success”, and 1.76% to 0.0% in term of “Failure” as compared to existing studies.

Avionics systems software usually has the characteristics of complex structure, wide function coverage, high reliability, and high safety. These characteristics have led to the increasing scale and complexity of software systems, and the increasing variety of research & development (R&D) personnel. This further intensify the knowledge-intensive trend of software development, and make the software requirements elicitation activities more complicated. In the knowledge engineering community, an ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization. This paper uses the ontology method to construct a requirement knowledge framework and requirement knowledge is expressed as a clear, complete, and consistent hierarchical ontology concept and association, which is more conducive to knowledge sharing and reuse as well as reflects multiple viewpoints of stakeholders. This paper builds a requirements knowledge multi-ontology framework which is divided into GO (generalization ontology), TO (task ontology), DO (domain ontology), and AO (application ontology). And it decomposes the GO into structure ontology and action ontology in the framework. It makes up for the deficiency of undifferentiated knowledge representation of the GO. Then, this paper proposes and integrates the concept of software requirement error pattern into the multi-ontology framework in a consistent form. In addition, this paper evaluates the quality of the constructed ontology and the evaluation results show that the constructed ontology in this paper has a high quality. Finally, this paper facilitates the requirements elicitation based on the multi-ontology framework to avoid errors and improve the quality and reliability of software products.

The requirements elicitation process aims to obtain a preliminary version of the requirements before their specification. However, due the nature of this process, it is very difficult to know if the elicited requirements have quality. Furthermore, there are some metrics that allow requirements engineers to measure some aspects of the elicitation process and its final product (i.e., a preliminary version of the requirements, also called pre-requirements), however there is no way of measuring and controlling the elicited pre-requirements. With the aim of understanding, evaluating, and improving the requirements elicitation process, the existing metrics for this process have been analyzed and, as a consequence, eight metrics using the GQM paradigm are proposed. Additionally, a preliminary validation of these metrics has been performed in the context of a small-sized software enterprise. The obtained results are also presented.

As an important part of Industry 4.0, industrial software development must be highly flexible and reconfigurable to deal with a large number of requirements and random failures during the manufacturing process. Requirements understanding errors that occur in the early stages of software development often cannot be discovered prior to the testing phase. Therefore, the analysis and understanding of requirements are particularly crucial in the software development process. In this paper, a knowledge-driven functional-oriented requirements elicitation and analysis method are proposed to extract both functional and non-functional requirements from design documents. Nonfunctional requirements which are implicit in the documents will be elicited according to the domain knowledge graphs and predefined rules. A domain glossary is also constructed for the elicitation process, especially from unstructured sources. Domain knowledge graphs are modified periodically according to the feedback information to form a closed loop from requirements to code. The feasibility of the proposed method is demonstrated under an automobile welding line.

Context: Requirements Elicitation is an essential part of the software development process. Design Thinking (DT) arises as an alternative approach for supporting the Requirements Elicitation step. Empirical studies have shown that the use of DT in the software development process can be beneficial. The literature offers a wide variety of DT techniques. However, there is a lack of studies that mention which information is needed to use the techniques and which results they generate. Objective: Motivated by this need, this work aims to assist the software engineers in selecting which DT techniques are more suitable to support the requirements elicitation step. Method: We performed a literature review to identify DT techniques that can be used for the requirements elicitation. Next, we analysed and modelled the techniques identified using SADT diagrams. We grouped the DT techniques into ten categories according to their main purpose. Based on the SADT diagrams, we elaborated a comparative table for these categories, showing for each technique: input, control, mechanism, and output terms. We carried out a feasibility study to verify whether the comparison tables among the DT techniques provide the necessary information for software engineers. Results: Our preliminary results showed that the comparative tables, describing the inputs, control, mechanism, and outputs, helped software engineers to select the DT technique according to their goals. Conclusion: The results provided evidence that the DT techniques comparison table is promising in the context of requirements elicitation decision making to choose the most appropriate DT techniques.

Requirements engineering is a crucial stage for the success of any software, as it allows a better understanding of the needs and desires of the customers or future users. In software development for autistic users, inexperienced software engineers face difficulties in the requirements engineering stage, as there are few specific techniques and artifacts to gather requirements in such context. The challenges increase when considering low-functioning autistic people, who have the most severe limitations of the disorder. Considering the above, in this paper, we present two artifacts to support the elicitation of requirements in software projects for autistic users. We developed a set of interviewing questions based on the opinion of both software development practitioners and caregivers. Also, we have drawn inspiration in a commercial canvas model to synthesize relevant data obtained with the interviews. When validating the artifacts, we got indicators of the feasibility of applying the artifacts in an actual development project. By developing and integrating these artifacts, we intend to support the requirements engineering stage and continue their development and study in further contexts.

E-government information systems projects in developing countries face several challenges that lead to their partial or total failure. Several causes of e-government information systems project failure have been identified, including inadequate requirement engineering. The overall failure rate of e-government information systems projects due to requirements engineering inadequacies is still high. Inadequate requirement engineering leads to systems with missing features, low quality, project costs, and time overrun. This research aims to design a framework to guide practitioners in e-government information systems requirements engineering processes. The design science research approach and qualitative data collection and analysis methods were applied through three iterative cycles of rigor, design, and relevancy. The proposed framework is based on goals and viewpoints requirements engineering. It consists of three models: the e-government viewpoints model, the e-government goals model, and the e-government requirements engineering process model. The framework was validated through two rounds of Delphi focus group discussion techniques and a single technical action research case study. The results showed a strong consensus among practitioners about the proposed framework's ease of use and utility with a mean agreement of 4.429/5. The technical action research involved five practitioners who applied the proposed framework to discover the requirements of the road emergency response module of road safety information systems of Tanzania. A total of 104 requirements were discovered compared to nine requirements elicited before without using the proposed framework. The overall objective of the proposed framework is to facilitate the discovery and specification of adequate and relevant requirements for e-government information systems projects and ultimately reduce the rate of e-government projects failure and contribute to the realisation of e-government benefits.

In an aging population, technology-based solutions such as Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems are indispensable for supporting senior citizens in retaining their independence. Senior citizens have different physical abilities, contexts of use, and attitudes towards technology than younger user groups. This calls for a different approach to assure their acceptance of technologies. In the STuDi research project, we constructed a set of interview guidelines based on literature on technology acceptance and requirements elicitation and validation with senior citizens, and conducted 33 validation interviews with senior citizens who used a prototypical AAL system for 5–12 months. The guidelines facilitated pleasant conversations and helped obtain a good understanding of factors contributing to acceptance versus avoidance and dismissal of the AAL system. We share the findings of our literature search and the resulting interview guidelines, which we consider a suitable instrument for researchers and practitioners for measuring technology acceptance and/or validating a (prototypical) system with senior citizens, and possibly also for requirements elicitation.

The world’s unprecedented growth of the senior demographic is bringing key age-related issues to the forefront. Issues such as memory loss, vision impairment, hearing loss, loss of mobility (or loss of dexterity in the hands), and speech loss prevent seniors from interacting with others. We believe that a lot can be done to improve seniors’ lives, but current smartphone apps are often not usable or adaptable enough to address these issues. Specifically, current app development practices do not seem to adequately consider seniors’ needs and possibly lack a process that includes asking appropriate questions, building relevant scenarios, or coming up with essential requirements. We observe that omitting questions and asking irrelevant or incorrect questions in the requirements elicitation phase needs to be avoided. We propose a Goals, Questions, Scenarios, Requirements (GQSR) Elicitation framework as well as an expanded questionnaire approach for requirements elicitation. We develop improved guidelines and rules for questions as part of the question/interview process. Through asking important questions and applying the GQSR framework, we developed the smartphone app, HOPE (Helping Our People Easily), with the intention of helping seniors in their daily lives and alleviating problems such as aphasia. The GQSR framework defines nonfunctional requirements (NFRs), FRs, questions, and scenarios producing questionnaires for the purposes of interviewing seniors. We achieve traceability between the GQSR Requirements Engineering framework and the HOPE smartphone app. HOPE, a real mobile app targeting seniors, is used to illustrate and evaluate our framework.

ions are significant domain terms that have assisted in requirements elicitation and modeling. To extend the assistance towards requirements validation, we present in this paper an automated approach to identifying the abstractions for supporting requirements-based testing. We select relevant Wikipedia pages to serve as a domain corpus that is independent from any specific software system. We further define five novel patterns based on part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing, and frame our candidate abstractions in the form of pairs for better testability. We evaluate our approach with six software systems in two application domains: Electronic health records and Web conferencing. The results show that our abstractions are more accurate than those generated by two of the state-of-the-art techniques. Initial findings also indicate our abstractions’ capabilities of revealing bugs and matching the environmental assumptions created manually.

Context: The implementation of the Brazilian General Data Protection Law (LGPD) may impact activities carried out by the software development teams. It is necessary for developers to know the existing techniques and tools to carry out privacy requirements elicitation. Objectives: In this research, we investigated the perception of agile software development team members from different organizations, regarding the impact that LGPD will have on the activities of the software development process. Methods: We conducted an online survey and a systematic literature review to identify the techniques, methodologies and tools used in the literature to perform privacy requirements elicitation in the context of Agile Software Development (ASD). In addition, we also investigated the perception of an agile team from a Federal Public Administration organization regarding the impacts of the obligation to develop software in accordance with the LGPD. Results: Our findings reveal that agile teams know the concepts related to data privacy legislation, but they do not use the techniques proposed in the literature to perform privacy requirements elicitation. In addition, agile teams face problems with outdated software requirements specifications and stakeholders’ lack of knowledge regarding data privacy. Conclusions: Agile teams need to improve their knowledge on privacy requirements.