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A requirements monitoring framework for enterprise systems

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Abstract

Requirements compliant software is becoming a necessity. Fewer and fewer organizations will run their critical transactions on software that has no visible relationship to its requirements. Businesses wish to see their software being consistent with their policies. Moreover, partnership agreements are pressuring less mature organizations to improve their systems. Businesses that rely on web services, for example, are vulnerable to the problems of their web service providers. While electronic commerce has increased the speed of on-line transactions, the technology for monitoring requirements compliance—especially for transactions—has lagged behind. To address the requirements monitoring problem for enterprise information systems, we integrate techniques for requirements analysis and software execution monitoring. Our framework assists analysts in the development of requirements monitors for enterprise services. The deployed system raises alerts when services succeed or fail to satisfy their specified requirements, thereby making software requirements visible. The framework usage is demonstrated with an analysis of ebXML marketplace specifications. An analyst applies goal analysis to discover potential service obstacles, and then derives requirements monitors and a distributed monitoring system. Once deployed, the monitoring system provides alerts when obstacles occur. A summary of the framework implementation is presented, along with analysis of two monitor component implementations. We conclude that the approach implemented in the framework, called ReqMon, provides real-time feedback on requirements satisfaction, and thereby provides visibility into requirements compliance of enterprise information systems.

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Notes

  1. Letier and van Lamsweerde provide tactics for determining responsibility assignment when it is not specified [46].

  2. The analysis of the converse obstacle “confirmation despite bad credit” is very similar.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and members of IFIP 2.9 Requirement Engineering Working Group. The feedback, provided at the IFIP 2.9 Workshops 2001 and 2002, was instrumental in the development of this work. Special thanks go to Martin Feather, Steve Fickas, and Axel van Lamsweerde for their comments on this work. Of course, any errors found herein are the sole responsibility of the author.

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  1. Management Information Systems, College of Business, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, 97331-2603, USA

    William N. Robinson

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Robinson, W.N. A requirements monitoring framework for enterprise systems. Requirements Eng 11, 17–41 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-005-0016-3

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