Skip to main content
Springer Nature Link
Log in

What Is Essential? – A Pilot Survey on Views About the Requirements Metamodel of reqT.org

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9619))

  • 3061 Accesses

Abstract

[Context & motivation] This research preview paper presents ongoing work on the metamodel of a free software requirements modeling tool called reqT that is developed in an educational context. The work aims to make an initial validation of a survey instrument that elicits views on the metamodel of the reqT tool, which aims to engage computer science students in Requirements Engineering (RE) through an open source DSL embedded in the Scala programming language. [Question] The research question is: Which RE concepts are essential to include in the metamodel for a requirements engineering tool in an educational context? [Principal ideas] A survey instrument is developed, with a list of 92 concepts (49 entities, 15 relations and 28 attributes) and a set of questions for each concept, to elicit the respondents’ views on the usage and interpretation of each concept. [Contribution] The survey is initially validated in a pilot study involving 14 Swedish RE scholars as subjects. The survey results indicate that the survey is feasible. The analysis of the responses suggest that many of the concepts in the metamodel are used frequently by the respondents and there is a large degree of agreement among the respondents about the meaning of the concepts. The results are encouraging for future work on empirical validation of the relevance of the reqT metamodel.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. 1.

    The Lund Univ. MSc-level RE course can be found at: http://cs.lth.se/education.

  2. 2.

    The survey is available at https://github.com/reqT/reqT/tree/3.0.x/survey.

  3. 3.

    https://www.ireb.org/en/cpre/cpre-glossary/.

  4. 4.

    One subject answered NO on all background questions and was therefore excluded.

References

  1. Callele, D., Makaroff, D.: Teaching requirements engineering to an unsuspecting audience. In: Proceedings of the 37th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, SIGCSE 2006, pp. 433–437 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Carrillo de Gea, J., Nicolas, J., Aleman, J., Toval, A., Ebert, C., Vizcaino, A.: Requirements engineering tools. IEEE Softw. 28(4), 86–91 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Lauesen, S.: Software Requirements - Styles and Techniques. Addison-Wesley, Reading (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Memon, R.N., Ahmad, R., Salim, S.S.: Problems in requirements engineering education: a survey. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Frontiers of Information Technology, FIT 2010, pp. 5:1–5:6. ACM (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Metzger, A., Pohl, K.: Variability management in software product line engineering. In: 29th International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 186–187. IEEE (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Regev, G., Gause, D.C., Wegmann, A.: Experiential learning approach for requirements engineering education. Requirements Eng. 14(4), 269–287 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Regnell, B.: reqT.org – towards a semi-formal, open and scalable requirements modeling tool. In: Doerr, J., Opdahl, A.L. (eds.) REFSQ 2013. LNCS, vol. 7830, pp. 112–118. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Tobias Kaufmann and Klaus Pohl for contributions to the variability model in Sect. 2. This work is partly funded by VINNOVA within the EASE project.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Björn Regnell

Authors
  1. Björn Regnell
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Björn Regnell .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Maya Daneva

  2. Universidad Politècnica de Valencia, Valencia, Spain

    Oscar Pastor

Appendix A: Definitions of Metamodel Concepts of reqT v3.0

Appendix A: Definitions of Metamodel Concepts of reqT v3.0

figure b

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

Regnell, B. (2016). What Is Essential? – A Pilot Survey on Views About the Requirements Metamodel of reqT.org. In: Daneva, M., Pastor, O. (eds) Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. REFSQ 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9619. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30282-9_16

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30282-9_16

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-30281-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-30282-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics