Scenarios have been advocated as a means of improving requirements engineering yet few methods or tools exist to support scenario based RE. The paper reports a method and software assistant tool for scenario-based RE that integrates with use case approaches to object oriented development. The method and operation of the tool are illustrated with a financial system case study. Scenarios are used to represent paths of possible behaviour through a use case and these are investigated to elaborate requirements. The method commences by acquisition and modelling of a use case. The use case is then compared with a library of abstract models that represent different application classes. Each model is associated with a set of generic requirements for its class, hence, by identifying the class(es) to which the use case belongs, generic requirements can be reused. Scenario paths are automatically generated from use cases, then exception types are applied to normal event sequences to suggest possib...

This paper describes the Multiagent Systems Engineering (MaSE) methodology. MaSE is a general purpose, methodology for developing heterogeneous multiagent systems. MaSE uses a number of graphically based models to describe system goals, behaviors, agent types, and agent communication interfaces. MaSE also provides a way to specify architecture-independent detailed definition of the internal agent design. An example of applying the MaSE methodology is also presented.

A requirements specification defines the requirements for the future system at a conceptual level (i.e. class or type level). In contrast, a scenario represents a concrete example of current or future system usage. In early RE phases, scenarios are used to support the definition of high level requirements (goals) to be achieved by the new system. In many cases, those goals can to a large degree be elicited by observing, documenting and analysing scenarios about current system usage, i.e. the new system must often fulfil many of the functional and non-functional goals of the existing system. To support the elicitation and validation of the goals achieved by the existing system and to illustrate problems of the old system we propose to capture current system usage using rich media (e.g. video, speech, pictures etc.) and to interrelate those observations with the goal definitions. Thus, we particularly aim at making the abstraction process which leads to the definition of the conceptual models more transparent and traceable. More precisely, we relate the parts of the observations which have caused the definition of a goal or against which a goal was validated with the corresponding goal. These interrelations provide the basis for

An approach for guiding the construction of use case specifications is presented. A use case specification comprises contextual information of the use case, its change history, the complete graph of possible pathways, attached requirements and open issues. The proposed approach delivers a use case specification as an unambiguous natural language text. This is done by a stepwise and guided process which progressively transforms initial and partial natural language descriptions of scenarios into well structured, integrated use case specifications. The basis of the approach is a set of linguistic patterns and linguistic structures. The former constitutes the deep structure of the use case specification whereas the latter corresponds to the surface structures. The paper presents the use case model, the linguistic basis and the guided process along with the associated guidelines and support rules. The process is illustrated with the automated teller machine (ATM) case study.

Abstract—Use cases are believed to be a good basis for system testing. Yet, to automate the test generation process, there is a large gap to bridge between high-level use cases and concrete test cases. We propose a new approach for automating the generation of system test scenarios in the context of object-oriented embedded software, taking into account traceability problems between highlevel views and concrete test case execution. Starting from a formalization of the requirements based on use cases extended with contracts, we automatically build a transition system from which we synthesize test cases. Our objective is to cover the system in terms of statement coverage with those generated tests: An empirical evaluation of our approach is given based on this objective and several case studies. We briefly discuss the experimental deployment of our approach in the field at Thalès Airborne Systems. Index Terms—Use case, test generation, scenarios, contracts, UML. 1

Use Cases are an effective technique to express Functional Requirements of a system in a very simple and easy-to-learn way. Use Cases are mainly composed of Natural Language (NL) sentences and the use of NL to describe the behavior of a system is always a critical point, due to the inherent ambiguities originating from the different possible interpretations of NL sentences. We discuss in this paper the application of analysis techniques based on a linguistic approach to detect, within requirements documents, defects related to such inherent ambiguity. Starting from the proposed analysis techniques we will define some metrics that will be used to perform a quality evaluation of requirements documents. Some available automatic tools supporting the linguistic analysis of NL requirements have been used to evaluate an industrial Use Cases document according to the defined metrics. A discussion on the application of linguistic analysis techniques to support semantic analysis of Use Cases is also reported. 1.

The support for traceability between requirement specifications has been recognised as an important task in the development life-cycle of software systems. In this paper, we present a rule-based approach to support the automatic generation of traceability relations between documents which specify requirement statements and use cases (expressed in structured forms of natural language), and analysis object models for software systems. The generation of such relations is based on traceability rules of two different types of traceability rules. More specifically, we use requirement-to-object-model rules to trace the requirements and use case specification documents to an analysis object model, and inter-requirements traceability rules to trace requirement and use case specification documents to each other. By deploying such rules, our approach can generate four different types of traceability relations. To implement and demonstrate our approach, we have implemented a traceability prototype system. This system assumes requirement and use case specification documents and analysis object models represented in XML. It also uses traceability rules are also represented in an XML-based rule mark-up language that we have developed for this purpose. This XML-based representation framework makes it easier to deploy our prototype in settings characterised by the use of heterogeneous software engineering and requirements management tools. The developed prototype has been used in a series of experiments that we have conducted to evaluate our approach. The results of these

This thesis defines the boundaries of Software Architecture for Language Engineering (SALE), an area formed by the intersection of human language computation and software engineering. SALE covers all areas of the provision of infrastructural systems to support research and development of language processing software. In order to demonstrate the theory developed in relation to SALE, we present the design, implementation and evaluation of GATE, a General Architecture for Text Engineering, which illustrates in practice many of the theoretical points made.

The elicitation, modeling and analysis of requirements have consistently been one of the main challenges during the development of complex systems. Telecommunication systems belong to this category of systems due to the worldwide distribution and the heterogeneity of today’s telecommunication networks. Scenarios and use cases have become popular for capturing and analyzing requirements. However, little research has been done that compares different approaches and assesses their suitability for the telecommunications domain. This paper defines evaluation criteria and then reviews fifteen scenario notations. In addition, twenty-six approaches for the construction of design models from scenarios are briefly compared.

Privacy protection is important in many industries, such as healthcare and finance. Capturing and modeling privacy requirements in the early stages of system development is essential to provide high assurance of privacy protection to both stakeholders and consumers. This paper presents a framework for modeling privacy requirements in the role engineering process. Role engineering entails defining roles and permissions as well as assigning the permissions to the roles. Role engineering is the first step to implement a Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) system and essentially a Requirements Engineering (RE)process. The framework includes a data model and a goal-driven role engineering process. It seeks to bridge the gap between high-level privacy requirements and low-level access control policies by modeling privacy requirements as the contexts and obligations of RBAC entities and relationships. A healthcare example is illustrated with the framework.