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Employing resilience engineering in eliciting software requirements for complex systems: experiments with the functional resonance analysis method (FRAM)

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Abstract

Resilience engineering provides concepts and methods for assessing the ability of socio-technical systems to adjust their functioning before, during, or after changes or disturbances. As such, this field of study has great potential to contribute to software engineering—particularly for the requirements specification for information systems—that deals with variability, unpredictability, and adaptation in complex contexts. Despite software engineers’ efforts, the requirements phase is still challenging, especially in complex socio-technical systems. In these systems, the software must be more resilient and adaptable to deal with uncertain situations. Thus, this study aimed to investigate the contributions of resilience engineering to requirements engineering to identify software requirements for complex systems. Two experiments were performed with software professionals to produce requirements specifications in healthcare. The participants used information from the functional resonance analysis method (FRAM) compared to business process modeling notation (BPMN). Both experiments were supported by a systematic approach called MacKnight. This study indicates innovative strategies to gather resilient software requirements from FRAM models for complex systems.

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Acknowledgements

We want to thank the research funding agencies and UFRJ partners for the opportunity to conduct this research. In particular, we want to thank the CAPES, CNPQ, UFRJ, CCE PUC-Rio, CEE-FIOCRUZ for the opportunity to develop this experiment and for supporting this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Programa de Pós-Graduação Em Informática, Universidade Federal Do Rio de Janeiro, UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil

    Elaine Alves de Carvalho, José Orlando Gomes, Mônica Ferreira da Silva & Paulo Victor Rodrigues de Carvalho

  2. Centro de Estudos Estratégicos (CEE), Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, FIOCRUZ, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil

    Alessandro Jatobá

  3. Instituto de Engenharia Nuclear (IEN), Comissão Nacional de Energia Nuclear (CNEN), Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil

    Paulo Victor Rodrigues de Carvalho

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  1. Elaine Alves de Carvalho
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  2. José Orlando Gomes
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  3. Alessandro Jatobá
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Correspondence to Elaine Alves de Carvalho.

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de Carvalho, E.A., Gomes, J.O., Jatobá, A. et al. Employing resilience engineering in eliciting software requirements for complex systems: experiments with the functional resonance analysis method (FRAM). Cogn Tech Work 23, 65–83 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-019-00620-0

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