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Requirements-driven software evolution

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Computer Science - Research and Development

Abstract

It is often the case that stakeholders want to strengthen/weaken or otherwise change their requirements for a system-to-be when certain conditions apply at runtime. For example, stakeholders may decide that if requirement R is violated more than N times in a week, it should be relaxed to a less demanding one R−. Such evolution requirements play an important role in the lifetime of a software system in that they define possible changes to requirements, along with the conditions under which these changes apply. In this paper we focus on this family of requirements, how to model them and how to operationalize them at runtime. In addition, we evaluate our proposal with a case study adopted from the literature.

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Notes

  1. Here, we use the term pattern in its more general sense: “a form or model proposed for imitation” or “something designed or used as a model for making things” (cf. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pattern). The reader should not confuse it with design pattern, a more common use for this word in Software Engineering.

  2. Note that, for consistency reasons, even a very simple EvoReq like aborting (which consists of a single operation) is represented as a strategy through the use of the pattern Abort.

  3. Note, however, that is not our intention to prove that the LAS would not have failed if it had been built as an adaptive system using our proposal. Many of the analyses conducted over the failure indicate that the procurement and the development processes were flawed, producing a bad quality system in general. Hence, if adaptation mechanisms had been developed to work with the LAS, there is no guarantee these would have been properly developed and have good quality and would therefore also be prone to failure. Our objectives here are to learn from the problems detected in the LAS in order to identify critical requirements and use those to develop a new system which would, in theory, be designed properly and have good quality in general.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the ERC advanced grant 267856 “Lucretius: Foundations for Software Evolution” (unfolding during the period of April 2011–March 2016)—http://www.lucretius.eu.

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  1. Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento, Via Sommarive 14, 38123, Trento, Italy

    Vítor E. Silva Souza, Alexei Lapouchnian, Konstantinos Angelopoulos & John Mylopoulos

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  1. Vítor E. Silva Souza
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Correspondence to Vítor E. Silva Souza.

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Souza, V.E.S., Lapouchnian, A., Angelopoulos, K. et al. Requirements-driven software evolution. Comput Sci Res Dev 28, 311–329 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-012-0232-2

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