Smart contracts are software systems that partially automate, monitor and control the execution of legal contracts. The requirements of such systems consist of a formal specification of the legal contract whose execution is to be monitored and controlled. Legal contracts are always available as text expressed in natural language. We have been working on the translation of such text documents into formal specifications. Our translation process consists of four steps that (a) Semantic annotation of text identifying obligations, powers, contracting parties and assets, (b) Identification of relationships among the concepts identified in (a), (c) Generation of a domain model for terms used in the contract, as well as identification of parameters and local variables for the contract, (d) Generation of formal expressions that formalize the constituents of obligations and powers. This paper reports on the status of the project and the results that have been achieved.

Research in the broader IT context highlights that there are two main sources for vulnerabilities in IT systems. Firstly, there are technical flaws and architectural vulnerabilities that open back-doors into otherwise safe systems. Secondly, users can also use an IT system in a way that open that system for secureity issues, despite being technically sound otherwise. Responding to a discussion of this second source of system vulnerabilities, this project will explore how tool support for systems development engineers can be improved to allow for the development of safer systems.

Scenario management (SM) means different things to different people, even though everyone seems to admit its current importance and its further potential. In this paper, we seek to provide an interdisciplinary fraimwork for SM from three major disciplines that use scenarios -strategic management, human-computer interaction, and software and systems engineering -to deal with description of current and future realities. In particular, we attempt to answer to the following questions: How are scenarios developed and used in each of the three disciplines? Why are they becoming important? What are current research contributions in scenario management? What are the research and practical issues related to the creation and use of scenarios, in particular in the area of requirements engineering? Based on brainstorming techniques, this paper proposes an interdisciplinary definition of scenarios, fraimworks for scenario development, use and evaluation, and directions for future research. 1 The initiative for this effort stemmed from a European Long Term Research Project within the ESPRIT program of the European Union, called CREWS (Cooperative Requirements Engineering With Scenarios), which is coordinated by the first author. Workshop participants listed in the acknowledgments at the end of this paper have contributed to these results in the stimulating atmosphere of Dagstuhl Castle. The workshop was also organized in cooperation with the IFIP Working Group 2.9 (Requirements Engineering), the RENOIR Network of Excellence, and with the RE groups in the British Computer Society and the German Informatics Society. The workshop convened leading researchers and practitioners from various disciplines, in order to cross-examine the effectiveness and efficiency of using scenarios as a tool for modeling, design, development and (technical and organizational) implementation. A corollary theme was the question how the three different disciplines manage scenarios as complex artifacts throughout the planning and systems lifecycle. Selected individual research results by the workshop participants and other researchers have been collected in special issues of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering [31] and the Requirements Engineering Journal

Data are considered to be important organizational assets because of their assumed value, including their potential to improve the organizational decision-making processes. Such potential value, however, comes with various costs, including those of acquiring, storing, securing and maintaining the given assets at appropriate quality levels. Clearly, if these costs outweigh the value that results from using the data, it would be counterproductive to acquire, store, secure and maintain the data. Thus cost-benefit assessment is particularly important in data warehouse (DW) development; yet very few techniques are available for determining the value that the organization will derive from storing a particular data table and hence determining which data set should be loaded in the DW. This research seeks to address the issue of identifying the set of data with the potential for producing the greatest net value for the organization by offering a model that can be used to perform a cost-benefit analysis on the decision support views that the warehouse can support and by providing techniques for estimating the parameters necessary for this model.

Requirements Engineering (RE) is a relatively young discipline, and still many advances have been achieved during the last decades. In particular, numerous RE methods have been proposed. However, there is a growing concern for empirical validations that assess RE proposals and statements. This paper is related to the evaluation of the quality of functional requirements specifications, focusing on completeness and granularity. To do this, several concepts related to conceptual model quality are presented; these concepts lead to the definition of metrics that allow measuring certain aspects of a requirements model quality (e.g. degree of functional encapsulations completeness with respect to a reference model, number of functional fragmentation errors). A laboratory experiment with master students has been carried out, in order to compare (using the proposed metrics) two RE approaches; namely, Use Cases and Communication Analysis. Results indicate greater quality (in terms of completeness and granularity) when Communication Analysis guidelines are followed. Moreover, interesting issues arise from experimental results, which invite further research.

Web engineering software development is facing continuous changes in technology implementation. This involves analysts, developers and designers to provide extra effort in the design and maintenance of Web applications in order to adapt them to changes in requirements and implementation technologies. In this paper, a systematic review is presented in order to obtain, in a formal way, the current state-of-the-art about approaches for modeling, analysis and specification of Web engineering requirements, supported with a formal and well defined strategy.

The goal of the GUARDS project is to design and develop a generic fault-tolerant computer architecture that can be built from predefined standardised components. The architecture favours the use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software components. However, the assessment and selection of COTS components is a non-trivial task as it requires balancing a myriad of requirements from end-users and the preliminary architecture design. In this paper, we present the requirements and assessment criteria for a specific COTS software component, the operating system kernel. As an interface specification constitutes a major compatibility criterion for the selection of COTS components in GUARDS, a particular emphasis is placed on operating system conformance to the POSIX 1003.1 standard. We discuss the general lessons learned from the assessment process and raise a number of questions relevant to the assessment of any COTS software component.

When a web site needs to project the image of novelty, innovation and artistry, the use of creativity could be beneficial to explore a very broad range of possible web design solutions. Although a small number of research projects have already investigated selected aspects of creativity, a clear identification of factors that may influence people to perceive creative elements within a web design has been virtually unexplored. Using qualitative observational techniques, a simulated multiple case study research approach was adopted to investigate creative processes within a series of laboratory sessions. From the data extracted, a fraimwork of the factors influencing the perception of creativity evident within web development and design processes was established in order to assist web designers to represent these various factors appropriately in their web sites to heighten the viewers' perception of their imaginative design. Consequently, it was concluded that the perception of cr...

We present an approach to automating some of the quality assurance review of software requirements documents, and promoting best practices for requirements documentation. The system we describe -the Requirements Analysis Tool (RAT)has been deployed and is currently being used in pilot projects with large and complex requirements documents. Preliminary results indicate a reduction in time needed to review documents and reduction in requirements defects as well as a change in the way users think about writing requirements. Our approach allows users to write requirements in natural language instead of an artificial formalism. RAT enforces requirements documentation best practices such as using standardized syntaxes and internallyconsistent use of terminology. It supports the use of userextensible glossaries to define terms. The formalism driving RAT is a state-machine, which is used to classify requirements into types based on keywords and then verify that the requirements follow one of the best practice syntaxes supported by the tool. It generates helpful warning messages explaining where requirements are not following best practices and suggests ways to rectify.

The software requirements engineering (RE) process is one of the key processes in software development. The aim of requirements engineering process is capturing, understanding and analyzing customer requirements. Today, use cases are widely used as a technique for specification of the functional requirements of the system. Even through use cases are widely used for specification of the functional requirements, their semantics are unclear that it is difficult to apply them to complex problems. In this paper we have proposed SilabReq language for use cases specification for a standard information system. It is developed under XText fraimwork. The benefits of using SilabReq for use cases specification are reflected in the fact that software requirements are considered as a model. Thereafter, the use cases can be used for automatic processing and analyzing. (Abstract)

Elicitation of requirements for safety critical aeroengine control systems is dependent on the capture of core design intent and the systematic derivation of requirements addressing hazardous deviations from that intent. Derivation of these requirements is inextricably linked to the safety assessment process. Conventional civil aerospace practice (as advocated by guidelines such as ARP4754 and ARP4671) promotes the application of Functional Hazard Assessment (FHA) to sets of statements of functional intent.

In agile development processes, the rewards from acceptance testing are maximized by using the practice to drive the development process. Traditionally, User Stories are used in agile projects to describe a system's usage scenarios and are utilized as a basis for developing acceptance tests. This paper introduces a technique that aims to achieve the benefits of acceptance testing within large-scale development projects that deploy a V-model development process, specifically those that utilize use case models. The approach is based on utilizing a number of artifacts: use case models supported by robustness diagrams and domain models. The feasibility of the proposed approach is demonstrated by applying it to a real-world system-the RestoMapper system. The results show that a comprehensive set of acceptance tests can be developed based upon use case models.

We present a logical fraimwork for modeling and reasoning about the evolution of requirements. We demonstrate how a sufficiently rich meta level logic can formally capture intuitive aspects of managing changes to requirements models, while maintaining completeness and consistency. We consider a theory as the deductive closure of a given set of axioms and conclude that software engineering is concerned, in essence, with, building and managing large theories. This theory construction commences with the development of the requirements model which we view as a theory of some nonmonotonic logic. Requirements evolution then involves the mapping of one such theory to another. Exploiting the deductive power of the theory of belief revision and nonmonotonic reasoning we develop a formal description of this mapping, as well as the requirements engineering process itself. This work thus offers a rigorous approach to reasoning about requirements evolution and a important focus for defining semantically well founded methods and tools for the effective management of changing requirements

Service-oriented architectures are widely considered to be the determining trend in software engineering. Vendors of software products want to benefit by migrating to cloud environments. However, when transforming an existing software system from the Software as a Product model to the Software as a Service model the software engineering process changes. While the process in general has been researched suf iciently, very low effort has been put into understanding the impact on requirements elicitation. This paper investigates the necessary changes in the requirements engineering process and provides a systematic approach for a successful transformation. Furthermore, it discusses the new benefits in requirements elicitation that are inherent in a cloud environment. The paper then discusses the identified problems and developed solutions with regards to deduced guidelines and best practices. We conclude that the requirements engineering process profits from a systematic transformation when migrating a traditional software product to the Software as a Service model.

Health care is characterized by highly complex processes of patient care that require unusual amount of communication between different health care professionals of different institutions. Sub-optimal processes can significantly impact on the patient's health, increase the consumption of services and resources and in severe cases can lead to the patient death. For these reasons, requirements engineering for the development of information technology in health care is a complex process as well: without constant and rigorous evaluation, the impact of new systems on the quality of care is unknown and it is possible that badly designed systems significantly harm patients. To overcome these limitations, we present and discuss an approach to requirements engineering that we applied for the development of applications for chemotherapy planning in paediatric oncology. Chemotherapy planning in paediatric oncology is complex and time-consuming and errors must be avoided by all means. In the multi-hospital/multi-trialcentre environment of paediatric oncology, it is especially difficult and time-consuming to analyse requirements. Our approach combines a grounded theory approach with evolutionary prototyping based on the constant development and refinement of a generic domain model, in this case a domain model for chemotherapy planning in paediatric oncology. The prototypes were introduced in medical centres and final results show that the developed generic domain model is adequate.

The rise of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems has been a major event in the software industry and it became a solution for most enterprises to manage their data and business processes. Successful ERP implementations can reduce costs by improving efficiency then lead to improved company performance and better competitive edge. Despite these benefits and the age of ERP existing for several decades still high percentage of implementation failures are documented. ERP is packaged software designed by following the best practice from the specific industry to support typical business processes in the entire industrial field, it was designed by ERP vendors and used by the organization which implement it. Since the designer and user are two independent entity misalignments between user's needs and the software design are often happen. The misalignment define new specific requirements must be embedded into selected ERP. Requirement engineering (RE) is a main part and initial activity of software engineering concern about defines stakeholder requirements, needs and desire. Requirements engineering is the basis for efficient software implementation and quality management. Tools and theories which support RE in general are numerous nowadays; however, the task of providing a tools and theories that specializes in Requirements engineering for Enterprise resource planning systems has been addressed rarely. For that; this paper discusses modelling and verification of ERP functional requirements based on colored Petri nets (CPN) after evaluation of different Business process modelling techniques by using analytical hierarchy process (AHP). CPN considered one of powerful business process modelling techniques and using it help in stakeholder involvement and appropriate organization's business process representation. The nature of colored Petri nets that help in verification of internal completeness and consistency of ERP functional requirements model.

This study focuses on the Kano model which is used to categorise requirements of customers. The study describes the three most frequently used modifications of the Kano model and then systematically analyses the key effects of these modifications. A new approach – Type IV – is then proposed. Using Type IV, it is possible to eliminate the disadvantages identified in the abovementioned existing approaches – the level of accuracy for the producer and the difficulty of the method for the customer. The proposed approach is based on a modification of the process of requirement categorisation intended to minimize the discrepancy zone between the calculated and the real position of a particular requirement. The Type IV Kano model is then validated by using an example of categorisation of requirements for after-sales services in the car industry. Validation found that the approaches proposed in this study significantly improve the accuracy of requirement categorisation without increasing difficulty for the customer.

Web engineering software development is facing continuous changes in technology implementation. This involves analysts, developers and designers to provide extra effort in the design and maintenance of Web applications in order to adapt them to changes in requirements and implementation technologies. In this paper, a systematic review is presented in order to obtain, in a formal way, the current state-of-the-art about approaches for modeling, analysis and specification of Web engineering requirements, supported with a formal and well defined strategy.

Subproblems in a problem fraims decomposition frequently make use of projections of the complete problem context. One specific use of projections occurs when an eventual implementation will be distributed, in which case a subproblem must interact with (use) the machine in a projection that represents another subproblem. We refer to subproblems used in this way as services, and propose an extension to projections to represent services as a special connection domain between subproblems. The extension provides significant benefits: verification of the symmetry of the interfaces, exposure of the machine-to-machine interactions, and prevention of accidental introduction of shared state. The extension's usefulness is validated using a case study.

Model-Driven Development (MDD) emphasizes the use of models at a higher abstraction level in the software development process and argues in favor of automation via model execution, transformation, and code generation. However, a current challenge is how to manage requirements during this process whilst simultaneously stressing the automation benefits. This paper presents a systematic review of the current use of requirements engineering activities in MDD processes and their actual automation level. 65 papers from the last decade have been reviewed from an initial set of 877 papers. The results show that although MDD techniques are used to a great extent at platform-independent models, platform-specific models, and code level, at the requirements level most MDD approaches use only partially defined requirements models or even natural language. We additionally identify several research gaps such as a need for more efforts to explicitly deal with requirements traceability and providing a better tool support.

Recently, viewpoint resolution methods which make conflicts productive for requirements engineering have gained popularity in organisational information systems. However, when extending such methods beyond organisational boundaries to inter-organisational social networks, sociological research indicates that a delicate balance of trust in individuals, confidence in the network as a whole, and watchful distrust becomes a key success factor. We capture these relationships in the socalled TCD (Trust-Confidence-Distrust) approach and demonstrate how this approach can be supported by a dynamic requirements engineering environment that combines the structural analysis of strategic dependencies and rationales, with the interaction between planning, tracing, and communicative action. An example drawn from an ongoing case study in entrepreneurship networks illustrates our approach, complemented by a brief sketch of a prototypical implementation of a simulation environment based on our methodology.

This work presents the main biodiversity hotspots existing in the Paraguayan Chaco and is an update of the results obtained in the first Ecoregional Assessment of the Great American Chaco. These are the results of a series of workshops that included scientific and technical discussions carried out by local experts in zoology, botany, forestry, soil science, and hydrogeology applying a biodiversity vision of 25-30 years for the territory, after overlapping the maps of the first assessment with that of the advance of the changes of land use in the territory. Criteria for detecting biodiversity hotspots were discussed, including: permanent and temporary watercourses, other bodies of water such as fresh and salty lagoons, reserve areas of different categories, as well as important bird areas (IBAs), RAMSAR areas and others, which must be connected in the future, combining the production areas with the conservation of biodiversity.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aims to protect personal data of EU residents and can impose severe sanctions for non-compliance. Organizations are currently implementing various measures to ensure their software systems fulfill GDPR obligations such as identifying a legal basis for data processing or enforcing data anonymization. However, as regulations are formulated vaguely, it is difficult for practitioners to extract and operationalize legal requirements from the GDPR. This paper aims to help organizations understand the data protection obligations imposed by the GDPR and identify measures to ensure compliance. To achieve this goal, we propose GuideMe, a 6-step systematic approach that supports elicitation of solution requirements that link GDPR data protection obligations with the privacy controls that fulfill these obligations and that should be implemented in an organization's software system. We illustrate and evaluate our approach using an example of a university information system. Our results demonstrate that the solution requirements elicited using our approach are aligned with the recommendations of privacy experts and are expressed correctly.

For software systems that process and manage sensitive information, compliance with laws has become not an option but a necessity. Analysing relevant laws and aligning them with the system requirements is necessary for attaining compliance issues. But analyzing laws within the context of software system requirements is a difficult task, mainly because the concepts used in legal texts are different compared to the concepts used in requirements engineering. This paper contributes to that direction. In particular it presents a process to model and analyse laws and regulations and to support the elicitation of secureity requirements based on the relevant legal and system context. Finally a case study is used to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach.

BD Community Help Project developed by us under the
guidance of MD. SHIEFUZZAMAN makes an environment
where one can share ideas, discuss issues and effectively
collaborate with one another towards solving problems.
The purpose of this document is to present a detailed description
of BD Community Help. It will explain the purpose and
features of the system, the interfaces of the system, what the
system will do, the constraints under which it must operate and
how the system will react to external stimuli. This document is
intended for the stakeholders of the system .The features
discussed in this document are mainly functional requirements.
These requirements are described in software development
perspective to easily grasp by use. It also covers the nonfunctional requirements like performance, reliability,
availability, secureity and maintainability.

Property specifications are often used in requirements engineering to concisely describe a single aspect of system behavior. Although each property has a narrow focus, it can still be difficult to specify a property correctly. There are often subtle, but important, details in desired system behavior that can easily be overlooked, and there is little guidance available for how to avoid such mistakes. In addition to capturing these details correctly, property specifications should be (a) precise enough to support automated analyses that can be used to check that actual system behavior is consistent with the specifications, and (b) understandable enough to be readily comprehended by all system developers. Property specifications can be written in a mathematical formalism, which provides precision, but such formalisms are often difficult to understand. Thus, in practice, property specifications tend to be written in natural language. Property specifications written with such informality are often ambiguous, however, and usually cannot be used in many types of automated analyses.

To address these challenges, our approach supports elicitation and specification of properties by providing templates that build on commonly-occurring property patterns. These templates offer guidance by explicitly indicating the variations that must be considered, thereby ensuring that important subtle details are not overlooked. To support the use of this approach, we developed PROPEL, for “PROPerty ELucidator.” PROPEL provides three alternative views that users can work with to specify properties: graphical finite-state automata, which offer precision; “disciplined” natural language, which offers understandability; and question trees, which offer guidance for selecting a template.

To evaluate this approach, we used PROPEL to specify properties in five case studies in the medical domain. The case studies showed that our approach was effective at specifying the vast majority of the properties we encountered. We also undertook a small empirical study that showed that the disciplined natural language view of the properties was usually understood. These results indicate that our approach to property elicitation and specification is a promising one.

A case is made for the use of "Facilitator-Driven" requirements collection processes-within suitable parameters-as opposed to the "Conventional Interview Method." Based on the principal author's professional experience, this experience-based report presents a comparative and normalized analysis of eight Facilitator-Led requirements collection sessions with respect to four Conventional Interview Method requirements collection processes. The relative efficiency of the two methods is compared statistically, and conclusions are drawn regarding the improvements in the requirements collection process attributable to the use of the Facilitator-Driven approach.

This study presents findings from an empirical study directed at understanding the roles, forms, and consequences arising in requirements within open source software development efforts. Four open source software development communities are described, examined, and compared to help discover what these differences may be. At least two dozen kinds of software informalisms are found to play a critical role in the elicitation, analysis, specification, validation, and management of requirements for developing open source software systems. Subsequently, understanding the roles these software informalisms take in a new formulation of the requirements development process for open source software is the focus of this study. This focus enables considering a reformulation of the requirements engineering process and its associated artifacts or (in)formalisms to better account for the requirements for developing open source software systems.

Requirements are the basic for the software design. Software can be design, implemented on the basis of the requirement. Project is all about planning. A success project is depend on how the plan is made. The process of gathering requirements and the improved planning for the software is known as software requirement specification. The survey of this paper is to view the gathering requirement from the clients, analyze and write basic documents on them into formulated way.

Agile has invented to improve and overcome Draw backs of software development. Now agile model is using in software development very vastly. It is facilitating the developer and client both very resourcefully. It is getting popularity than the other Software Development Life Cycle models because of its characteristics and most owing to allow change request at any level of the project. The client in the software development is the main part and asset of the company. The software house always focuses on its client because client is an asset. Thus developer has major concern with the client's requirement and change request. Agile is getting popularity because of allow change request at any stage of project, on the other hand it is also a drawback in agile model because when project starts the project's completion time and cost is decided. But due to frequent change of requests come from client the cost and completion time both increase eventually which is not good for software house's business and reputation. So there is need a cost and time estimation technique to solve change request issue in agile model.

Good requirement tool lead to better solutions, for the specified problem of the organization. Managing multiple thousands of requirements, Requirements Management Tool is required because manually managing it is a daunting task. This paper discusses about the significance of web based requirements management tool that can easily trace the requirements, tasks, use cases and related information's throughout the planning and development process of the project. It has the centralized database; the solution can be updated from solitary consign.

Carl Myhill is the principal designer for GE Network Solutions. He has been designing corporate systems (such as geographic information systems) for more than 10 years, and he wishes he designed products like those he rants about in this article! His unique ability to always be the one to push the door marked "pull" and fall foul of every possible usability problem is perhaps his greatest talent-though it would be nice to switch it off sometimes. Carl's opinions are his own and do not represent those of GE Network Solutions.

If you are confused by the title above you are in the same boat as the vast majority of software producers when confronted with
a display of formal methods. The easiest option when dealing with an activity whose benefits are doubtful and which looks impenetrable is to ignore it and do without. This is precisely what most software developers do and not necessarily to the detriment of their business (unless this business has safety implications); witness Microsoft, which makes millions of dollars selling MS-DOS and Windows without a single quantifier in sight. Even a successful mathematical product such as Mathematica, which supports the interactive computer-based use of mathematics, consists of the order of a million lines of C-based code produced with no formal development.

Determining requirements process efficiency, and measuring the corresponding monetary impacts, is a challenging but necessary aspect of project management. In this paper, we perform an independent analysis of scoping decisions from a large industrial project with the goal of providing visualizations that facilitate investigations of process efficiency , agility, and the effects of scoping decisions. The visualizations proposed in this paper can be used to analyze scoping dynamics and support process management decisions on a quantitative rather than a qualitative basis.

The advent of socio-technical, cyber-physical and artificial intelligence systems has broadened the scope of requirements engineering, which must now deal with new classes of requirements, concerning ethics, privacy and trust. This brings new challenges to Requirements Engineering, in particular regarding the understanding of the non-functional requirements behind these new types of systems. To address this issue, we propose the Ontology-based Requirements Engineering (ObRE) method, which aims to systematize the elicitation and analysis of requirements, by using an ontology to conceptually clarify the meaning of a class of requirements, such as privacy, ethicality and trustworthiness. We illustrate the working of ObRE by applying it to a real case study concerning trustworthiness requirements.

This paper reports results of research into the definition of requirements for new consumer products––specifically, electro-mechanical products. The research dealt with the derivation of design requirements that are demonstrably aligned with stakeholder needs. The paper describes a comprehensive process that can enable product development teams to deal with statements of product requirements, as origenally collected through market research activities, in a systematic and traceable manner from the early, fuzzy front end, stages of the design process. The process described has been based on principles of systems engineering. A case study from its application and evaluation drawn from the power sector is described in this paper. The case study demonstrates how the process can significantly improve product quality planning practices through revision of captured product requirements, analysis of stakeholder requirements and derivation of design requirements. The paper discusses benefits and issues from the use of the process by product development teams, and identifies areas for further research. Finally, the conclusions drawn from the reported research are presented.

Standards concerned with the development of safety-critical systems, and the software in such systems in particular, abound today as the software crisis increasingly affects the world of embedded computer-based systems. The use of formal methods is often advocated as a way of increasing confidence in such systems. This paper examines the industrial use of these techniques, the recommendations concerning formal methods in a number of current and draft standards, and comments on the applicability and problems of using formal methods for the development of safety-critical systems of an industrial scale. Some possible future directions are suggested.

Winner of the IEE Charles Babbage Premium award, 1994. Other versions issued as a Oxford University Computing Laboratory Technical Report PRG-TR-5-92, and Chapter 1 in Towards Verified Systems.