Main topics:
In their seminal paper in the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, Zave and Jackson established a core ontology for Requirements Engineering (RE) and used it to formulate the “requirements problem”, thereby defining what it means to successfully complete RE. Given that stakeholders of the system-to-be communicate the information needed to perform RE, we…
A pluripotent information system is an open and distributed information system that (i) automatically adapts at runtime to changing operating conditions, and (ii) satisfies both the requirements anticipated at development time, and those unanticipated before but relevant at runtime. Engineering pluripotency into an information system therefore responds to two recurring critical issues: (i) the need…
In a Service-Oriented System (SOS), service requesters specify tasks that need to be executed and the quality levels to meet, whereas service providers advertise their services’ capabilities and the quality levels they can reach. Service selectors then match to the relevant tasks, the candidate services that can perform these tasks to the most desirable quality…
Open service-oriented systems which autonomously and continually satisfy users’ service requests to optimal levels are an appropriate response to the need for increased automation of information systems. Given a service request, an open service-oriented system interprets the functional and nonfunctional requirements laid out in the request and identifies the optimal selection of services-that is, identifies…
Representation and reasoning about information system (IS) requirements is facilitated with the use of goal models to describe the desired and undesired IS behaviors. One difficulty in goal modeling is arriving at a shared understanding of a goal model instance, mainly due to different backgrounds of the system stakeholders who participate in modeling, and the…
Neglecting traceability—i.e., the ability to describe and follow the life of a requirement—is known to entail misunderstanding and miscommunication, leading to the engineering of poor quality systems. Following the simple principles that (a) changes to UML model instances ought be justified to the stakeholders, (b) justification should proceed in a structured manner to ensure rigor…
Increasing automation requires open, distributed, service-oriented systems capable of multicriteria-driven, dynamic adaptation for appropriate response to changing operating conditions. We combine a simple architecture with a novel algorithm to enable openness, distribution, and multi-criteria-driven service composition at runtime. The service-oriented architecture involves mediator Web services coordinating other Web services into compositions necessary to fulfill user…
Definitions of the concepts derived from the goal concept (including functional and nonfunctional goal, hardgoal, and softgoal) used in requirements engineering are discussed, and precise (and, when appropriate, mathematical) definitions are suggested. The concept of satisficing, associated to softgoals is revisited. A softgoal is satisficed when thresholds of some precise criteria are reached. Satisficing does…
It is not feasible to engineer requirements for adaptable and open service-oriented systems (AOSS) by specifying stakeholders’ expectations in detail during system development. Openness and adaptability allow new services to appear at runtime so that ways in, and degrees to which the initial functional and nonfunctional requirements will be satisfied may vary at runtime. To…
Allocation of goal responsibilities to agent roles in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) influence the degree to which these systems satisfy nonfunctional requirements. This paper proposes a systematic approach that starts from nonfunctional requirements identification and moves towards agent role definition guided by the degree of nonfunctional requirements satisfaction. The approach relies on goal-dependencies to allow potential…
Initial software quality requirements tend to be imprecise, subjective, idealistic, and context-specific. An extended characterization of the common Softgoal concept is proposed for representing and reasoning about such requirements during the early stages of the requirements engineering process. The types of information often implicitly contained in a Softgoal instance are highlighted to allow richer requirements…
Representation and reasoning about information system (IS) requirements is facilitated with the use of goal models to describe the desired and undesired IS behaviors. One difficulty in building and using goal models is in knowing why a model instance is as it is at some point of the requirements engineering (RE) process. If justifications for…
The model identifies constructs that enable capturing the intrinsic characteristics of an agent system such as autonomy, intentionality, sociality, identity and boundary, or rational self- interest; an agent being an organizational actor and/or a software component. Such an approach of the concept of agent allows the analyst to have a holistic perspective integrating human and…
This paper proposes an agent-oriented metamodel that provides rigorous concepts for conducting enterprise modelling. The aim is to allow analysts to produce an enterprise model that precisely captures the knowledge of an organization and of its business processes so that an agent-oriented requirements specification of the system-to-be and its operational corporate environment can be derived…