Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Software requirements classification'

Software requirements classification, the practice of categorizing requirements by their type or purpose, can improve organization and transparency in the requirements engineering process and thus promote requirement fulfillment and software project completion. Requirements classification automation is a prominent area of research as automation can alleviate the tediousness of manual labeling and loosen its necessity for domain-expertise. This thesis explores the application of deep learning techniques on software requirements classification, specifically the use of word embeddings for document representation when training a convolutional neural network (CNN). As past research endeavors mainly utilize information retrieval and traditional machine learning techniques, we entertain the potential of deep learning on this particular task. With the support of learning libraries such as TensorFlow and Scikit-Learn and word embedding models such as word2vec and fastText, we build a Python system that trains and validates configurations of Naïve Bayes and CNN requirements classifiers. Applying our system to a suite of experiments on two well-studied requirements datasets, we recreate or establish the Naïve Bayes baselines and evaluate the impact of CNNs equipped with word embeddings trained from scratch versus word embeddings pre-trained on Big Data.

Open source projects do have requirements; they are, however, mostly informal, text descriptions found in requests, forums, and other correspondence. Understanding such requirements provides insight into the nature of open source projects. Unfortunately, manual analysis of natural language requirements is time-consuming, and for large projects, error-prone. Automated analysis of natural language requirements, even partial, will be of great benefit. Towards that end, I describe the design and validation of an automated natural language requirements classifier for open source software development projects. I compare two strategies for recognizing requirements in open forums of software features. The results suggest that classifying text at the forum post aggregation and sentence aggregation levels may be effective. Initial results suggest that it can reduce the effort required to analyze requirements of open source software development projects. Software development organizations and communities currently employ a large number of software development techniques and methodologies. This implied complexity is also enhanced by a wide range of software project types and development environments. The resulting lack of consistency in the software development domain leads to one important challenge that researchers encounter while exploring this area: specificity. This results in an increased difficulty of maintaining a consistent unit of measure or analysis approach while exploring a wide variety of software development projects and environments. The problem of specificity is more prominently exhibited in an area of software development characterized by a dynamic evolution, a unique development environment, and a relatively young history of research when compared to traditional software development: the open-source domain. While performing research on open source and the associated communities of developers, one can notice the same challenge of specificity being present in requirements engineering research as in the case of closed-source software development. Whether research is aimed at performing longitudinal or cross-sectional analyses, or attempts to link requirements to other aspects of software development projects and their management, specificity calls for a flexible analysis tool capable of adapting to the needs and specifics of the explored context. This dissertation covers the design, implementation, and evaluation of a model, a method, and a software tool comprising a flexible software development analysis framework. These design artifacts use a rule-based natural language processing approach and are built to meet the specifics of a requirements-based analysis of software development projects in the open-source domain. This research follows the principles of design science research as defined by Hevner et. al. and includes stages of problem awareness, suggestion, development, evaluation, and results and conclusion (Hevner et al. 2004; Vaishnavi and Kuechler 2007). The long-term goal of the research stream stemming from this dissertation is to propose a flexible, customizable, requirements-based natural language processing software analysis framework which can be adapted to meet the research needs of multiple different types of domains or different categories of analyses.

Advanced Surface Movement Guidance and Control Systems (A-SMGCS) help to further improve safety and efficiency of the traffic on the aerodrome surface. The current A-SMGCS sensor technologies have certain operational and functional limitations. A new and unprecedented sensor technology is being tested as a pilot project. This unique sensors is called MagSense®. It works based on the principle of detecting the influence of ferromagnetic materials on earth’s magnetic field. For applications in the aviation environment, learning processes are necessary which are generally based on the graphical depiction of stored sensor data and features to analyze the graphs. For this purpose a visualization and analysis tool is needed. In order to create an adequate tool to allow for depicting stored sensor data and the peaks caused by ferromagnetic objects in aircraft and vehicles, a requirements engineering process will be conducted wherein the requirements of the various stakeholders will be identified and harmonized. In general, the appropriate RE approach will ensure mutual agreement among the stakeholders and a set of requirements for the first edition of the tool without contradictions. The harmonized package of requirements will then be used as the starting point for a software development process, after which the tool will be produced as specified and validated as a part of this Master’s Thesis. This Master’s Thesis puts a special focus on the choice of a suitable method in Requirements Engineering and Requirements Management, adequately adapted to the project size and its quality. The selection of appropriate elements from the methodology as well as the outcomes from applying them on a specific software production project are at the core.

In this report, we investigate how the methods developed for using in Semantic Web technology could be used in capturing, modeling, developing, checking, and validating of requirements specifications. Requirements specification is a complex and time-consuming process. The goal is to describe exactly what the user wants and needs before the next phase of the software development cycle will be started. Any failure and mistake in requirements specification is very expensive because it causes the development of software parts that are not compatible with the real needs of the user and must be reworked later. When the analysis phase of a project starts, analysts have to discuss the problem to be solved with the customer (users, domain experts) and then write the requirements found in form of a textual description. This is a form the customer can understand. However, any textual description of requirements can be (and usually is) incorrect, incomplete, ambiguous, and inconsistent. Later on, the analyst specifies a UML model based on the requirements description written by himself before. However, users and domain experts cannot validate the UML model as most of them do not understand (semi-)formal languages such as UML. It is well-known that the most expensive failures in software projects have their roots in requirements specifications. Misunderstanding between analysts, experts, users, and customers (stakeholders) is very common and brings projects over budget. The goal of this investigation is to do some (at least partial) checking and validation of the UML model using a predefined domain-specific ontology in OWL, and to process some checking using the assertions in descriptive logic. As we described in our previous papers, we have implemented a tool obtaining a modul (a computer linguistic component) that can generate a text of requirements description using information from UML models, so that the stakeholders can read it and decide whether the analyst's understanding is right or how different it is from their own one. We argue that the feedback caused by the UML model checking (by ontologies and OWL DL reasoning) can have an important impact on the quality of the outgoing requirements. This report contains a description and explanation of methods developed and used in Semantic Web Technology and a proposed concept for their use in requirements specification. It has been written during my sabbatical in Oviedo and it should serve as a starting point for theses of our students who will implement ideas described here and run some experiments concerning the efficiency of the proposed method.

The article identifies the challenges during the system and specifically the software development process for safety critical electro-hydraulic control systems by using the example of the hydrostatic driveline with a four speed transmission of a feeder mixer. An optimized development approach for mobile machinery has to fulfill all the requirements according to the Machinery Directive 2006/42/EC, considering functional safety, documentation and testing requirements from the beginning and throughout the entire machine life cycle. The functionality of the drive line control could be verified in advance of the availability of a prototype by using a “software-in-the-loop” development approach, based on a MATLAB/SIMULINK model of the drive line in connection with the embedded software.

In den 80er und 90er Jahren hatten große Anwendungssysteme in Unternehmen einige hundert bis tausend Anwender. Der Software-Entwicklungsprozess für diese Anwendungen war innerhalb der Unternehmen relativ klar geregelt. Fachinformatiker und Fachabteilungen standen einander dabei gegenüber. Oft wurden auch externe Fachleute und Komponentenlieferanten integriert. Entwicklungsmethoden und Werkzeuge waren auf diese Situation ausgelegt. Seit dieser Zeit haben wesentliche Veränderungen stattgefunden. Internettechnologien haben neue Klassen von Applikationen ermöglicht, die wie folgt charakterisiert werden können: - Die Applikationen sind kooperativ (unternehmensübergreifend). Nicht selten sind 20-50 oder mehr Unternehmen z. B. bei Zulieferketten beteiligt. - Eine eigene Klasse bilden mandantenfähige Systeme sowie Business-to-Consumer Systeme (B2C) bei denen sehr große Nutzerzahlen konnektiert werden. - Die Entwicklungszeiten liegen im Bereich von Monaten statt Jahren für eine erste Bereitstellung einer Basislösung. - Die Systeme werden inkrementell unter starker Anwenderbeteiligung bis hin zur Endbenutzerbeteiligung weiterentwickelt. (...)

Software quality and reliability is a primary concern for successful development organizations. Over the years, researchers have focused on monitoring and controlling quality throughout the software process by helping developers to detect as many faults as possible using different fault based techniques. This thesis analyzed the software quality problem from a different perspective by taking a step back from faults to abstract the fundamental causes of faults. The first step in this direction is developing a process of abstracting errors from faults throughout the software process. I have described the error abstraction process (EAP) and used it to develop error taxonomy for the requirement stage. This thesis presents the results of a study, which uses techniques based on an error abstraction process and investigates its application to requirement documents. The initial results show promise and provide some useful insights. These results are important for our further investigation.

Product development process begins at a very abstract level of understanding the requirements. The data needs to be passed on the next phase of development. This happens after every stage for further development and finally a product is made. This thesis deals with the data exchange process of software development process in specific. The problem lies in handling of data in terms of redundancy and versions of the data to be handled. Also, once data passed on to next stage, the ability to exchange it in reveres order is not existent in evident forms. The results found during this thesis discusses the solutions for the problem by getting all the data at same level, in terms of its format. Having the concept ready, provides an opportunity to use this data based on our requirements. In this research, the problem of data consistency, data verification is dealt with. This data is used during the development and data merging from various sources. The concept that is formulated can be expanded to a wide variety of applications with respect to development process. If the process involves exchange of data - scalability and generalization are the main foundation concepts that are contained within the concept.

The support of mobile workers with mobile IT solutions can create dremendous improvements in mobile business processes of a company. The main charateristic of such a mobile system is the ability to connect via a (mobile) network to a central server, e.g. in order to access customer data. The frequency and the location of the use, data topicality, interaction requirements and many more are central aspects when developing a suitable system architecture. This paper provides a detailed decription of the four main software architectures for mobile systems and their main charateristics. Beyond, typical business requirements are developed, the implications for the system architecture for each of them is shown.

abstract: Text Classification is a rapidly evolving area of Data Mining while Requirements Engineering is a less-explored area of Software Engineering which deals the process of defining, documenting and maintaining a software system's requirements. When researchers decided to blend these two streams in, there was research on automating the process of classification of software requirements statements into categories easily comprehensible for developers for faster development and delivery, which till now was mostly done manually by software engineers - indeed a tedious job. However, most of the research was focused on classification of Non-functional requirements pertaining to intangible features such as security, reliability, quality and so on. It is indeed a challenging task to automatically classify functional requirements, those pertaining to how the system will function, especially those belonging to different and large enterprise systems. This requires exploitation of text mining capabilities. This thesis aims to investigate results of text classification applied on functional software requirements by creating a framework in R and making use of algorithms and techniques like k-nearest neighbors, support vector machine, and many others like boosting, bagging, maximum entropy, neural networks and random forests in an ensemble approach. The study was conducted by collecting and visualizing relevant enterprise data manually classified previously and subsequently used for training the model. Key components for training included frequency of terms in the documents and the level of cleanliness of data. The model was applied on test data and validated for analysis, by studying and comparing parameters like precision, recall and accuracy.<br>Dissertation/Thesis<br>Masters Thesis Engineering 2016

The support of mobile workers with mobile IT solutions can create tremendous improvements in mobile business processes of a company. The main characteristic of such a mobile system is the ability to connect via a (mobile) network to a central server, e.g. in order to access customer data. This paper presents a detailed description of the four main software architectures for mobile client/server-based systems and their main characteristics. Beyond, typical business requirements in mobile environments like the location of use, data topicality, interaction requirements, synchronisation mechanisms and many more are mapped onto each of these architectures. The presented results can be used for discussing concurrent business needs as well as for deriving a mobile system architecture based on these needs.

Today, Software is becoming increasingly important. Systems are growing and will continue to increase in complexity in the future. This makes maintenance complicated and expensive. Therefore traceability between requirements and source code by trace-links is becoming more important. But many software systems either have no or few trace-links. In some cases, it is urgent to recover these links, for example, to find out the status of a project. This recovery is made more difficult by distributed or incomplete requirements documents. Experts and strong tools are necessary. These theses visualize and analyze the items and their dependencies within the requirements document and the source code based on the results of an expert tool. We found six attributes that support the recovery of trace-links between these items of the requirements document and source code.:1 Einleitung 1.1 Motivation - Warum Traceability? 1.2 Aufgabenstellung 1.3 Aufbau der Arbeit 2 Grundlagen & Begriffsklärungen 2.1 Softwareartefakt 2.2 Softwareprojekt 2.3 Vollständigkeit eines Softwareprojektes 3 Traceability 3.1 Bedeutung von Traceability 3.1.1 Traceability Ziele 3.1.2 Traceability in der Realität 3.2 Herausforderungen von Traceability 3.2.1 Vorbereitung und Planung 3.2.2 Erstellung und Pflege von Links 3.2.3 Ergebnis und Auswertung 3.2.4 Austausch 3.3 Vorhandene Methoden zum Traceability Recovering 3.3.1 Basierend auf Feature Analysis 3.3.2 Basierend auf Information Retrieval 3.3.3 Basierend auf dem Verhalten der Programmierer 3.3.4 Basierend auf Versionsverwaltung 3.4 Vergleich der Methoden 4 Traceability Werkzeuge 4.1 Erwartungen 4.2 SoftRepo 4.3 Eclipse Capra 4.4 YAKINDU Traceability 4.5 DOORS 4.6 Vergleich der Anwendungen 5 Trace-Link Visualisierung 5.1 Vorhandene Arbeiten zur Trace-Link Visualisierung 5.2 Anforderungen 5.2.1 Anforderungen an Trace-Link Informationen 5.2.2 Anforderungen an die Visualisierungsanwendung 5.3 Visualisierungsformen 6 Entwurf und Implementierung 6.1 Verwendete Technologien 6.1.1 Prototyp 6.1.2 Resultierende Anwendung 6.2 Architektur 6.3 Datengrundlage 6.3.1 Entitäts Daten 6.3.2 Relation 6.4 Datenverarbeitung 6.4.1 Erstmalige Datenaufbereitung (von Schritt 3) 6.4.2 Berechnung der Koordinaten (von Schritt 6) 6.5 Benutzeroberfläche 6.5.1 Menüs 6.5.2 Dashboard 6.5.3 Exportfunktionen 6.6 Visualisierungen 6.6.1 Netzwerkgraph 6.6.2 Segeldiagramm 6.6.3 Sankey Diagramm 7 Evaluation 7.1 Testdaten 7.2 Resultate der Visualisierungen 7.2.1 Networkgraph 7.2.2 Segeldiagramm 7.2.3 Sankey Diagramm 7.3 Zusammenfassung 8 Zusammenfassung & Aussicht 8.1 Zusammenfassung 8.2 Bewertung der erstellten LinkViz Anwendung 8.3 Rückblick auf Forschungsfragen 8.4 Ausblick Anhang Abbildungsverzeichnis Tabellenverzeichnis Abkürzungsverzeichnis Literaturverzeichnis

The mobility attribute of a mobile agent implies deployment thereof in untrustworthy environments, which introduces malicious host threats. The research question deals with how a security framework could be constructed to address the mentioned threats without introducing high costs or restraining the mobile agent's autonomy or performance. Available literature have been studied, analysed and discussed. The salient characteristics as well as the drawbacks of current solutions were isolated. Through this knowledge a dynamic mobile agent security framework was defined. The framework is based on the definition of multiple security levels, depending on type of deployment environment and type of application. A prototype was constructed and tested and it was found to be lightweight and efficient, giving developers insight into possible security threats as well as tools for maximum protection against malicious hosts. The framework outperformed other frameworks / models as it provides dynamic solutions without burdening a system with unnecessary security gadgets and hence paying for it in system cost and performance<br>Computing<br>D.Phil.

The software plays an important role in the current era of automotive development and the robust functionality of a software can only be achieved by following proper development process. The requirement engineering and the management of requirements are one of the key point in the software development. The requirements help the software developer to validate and verify the designed software. The Knorr-Bremse is one of the leading company in the automotive and locomotive industry which expertise in the area of braking system. The software department has been searching for a new approach in the area of requirement tracing and to evaluate the progress and performance of the complete system. They planned to design a new tool which should be able to trace the requirement and signals which means it should detect the new variation in the project automatically and update the software modules and test cases. Another mandatory functionality of tool is the measurement of progress and performance of complete system/project. The evaluation includes the quality of work of the software developer as well as the recording of milestones which has been achieved. A project has been planned for this master thesis is to develop a tool using various programming languages such as C-sharp, ASCET, ESRA Launcher, Graph-viz and XML. The purpose of this tool is to solve the above stated scientific challenge. The first phase is to design a tool which extracts the specific project data such as requirements and signals from 620 Requirement Specification files and then this data would search for the multi-level trace points in software and test modules based data. Upon successful search, the tool generates graphical representation of trace points for selected level of architecture. The second phase is to enhance the tool for measure the progress and performance of project selected by user. This task has been performed by developing an KPI. The GUI has been developed which represents the previous and current progress of project using famous graphical methods such as histogram, stag bar, bubble chart etc.

Abstract Most of the current building simulation tools are the results of funded projects for particular research purposes. Normally, these tools are developed in one research organization and utilized by the organization's own staff rather than by external personnel. Financially and intellectually, it is definitely a huge waste that designers and engineers rarely use those tools while they have to deal with increasingly complex issues and surely need the assistance of building simulation tools in building practice. Therefore, this thesis is dedicated to bringing building simulation closer to practice. The general goal is to promote the usage of simulation tools not only by simulation experts for research purposes but also by designers and engineers in practical work. Abstract Since the well-adopted tool could only be established based on appropriate requirements analysis, attention is firstly devoted to perceiving engineer or practice demands in building design and operation activities. Building multi-criteria analysis, whole life cycle integration, interdisciplinary interaction, control-wise integration/optimization together with the influence of “Industry 4.0” in building discipline are discussed in sequence. This is not only an enumeration of emerging scenarios, but also an exploration to figure out that integrated requirement is of growing significance as buildings are becoming increasingly advanced and complex. Abstract Multi-criteria simulation analysis indicates that designers and engineers need to consider, at least, energy efficiency and initial cost simultaneously; human comfort, environmental impact, life cycle cost are also involved; however, current workflow and cooperation mechanism among different simulation tools could not sufficiently fulfill multi-criteria analysis demand in building design and operation activities. Other detailed discussions on energy and cost integrated simulation, energy and human comfort integrated simulation, control related simulations all indicate one conclusion that building practice is increasingly integrated but simulation ability is still insufficient and isolated. Therefore, related tools must be coordinated and connected from the socio-technical point of view to support building practice eventually. Abstract Recent development in multi-domain modeling language Modelica and Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI) standard has provided an efficient solution for both integration and practical utilization. The ideology of the transfer layer is introduced; open-to-public and free usable framework and associated collaborative mechanisms are proposed. Individual models and tools could be integrated together through co-simulation or model exchange under FMI standard; along with complete and accurate database, the integrated tools could be validated and documented together, then transferred to commercial partners for further improvement, marketing and sale. In such way, a collaborative framework to transfer knowledge from research to practice could be formed in order to sufficiently process integrated requirement issues; the usage of research-oriented tools could be intensified in building industrial practice. Abstract Connection, interoperability, technical standard, and workflow protocol, those general terms for cooperative simulation development are further discussed. Cooperative Modelica library development is taken as an example to illustrate associated problems and their solutions from both detailed technical and generalized socio-technical perspectives. Abstract Individual model quality is a fundamental guarantee for successful cooperative simulation system. Therefore a model comparison project is carried out for quality assurance purpose. First, a series of comparison validation tests are established with a stepwise increased level of complexity. Then, multiple participants with a diversity of simulation tools contribute simulation models and results for listed validation scenarios. During the result comparison process, the deviation is detected, the bug is fixed, the model is improved; cooperative relationship and workflow standard are formed. Abstract In the last, a multi-criteria and interdisciplinary simulation case is conducted as a demonstrated example of actual integrated requirement along with integration and practical utilization effort of simulation. This case aims to select an appropriate energy solution for a building from four alternatives. Traditional HVAC equipment, renewable energy devices, storage facilities are applied and arranged in groups under Demand Side Management strategy and dynamic control. Financial and environmental impacts are also calculated along with the traditional result of annual energy consumption. Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) method is applied to analyze the four alternative energy solutions with an overall consideration of energy consumption, energy production, initial cost, life-cycle cost, and CO2 emission.:Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 Integrated requirements in building practice Chapter 3 Isolated and insufficient building simulation tools Chapter 4 Practice oriented tool integration and improvement Chapter 5 Cooperative development in Modelica and Annex 60 Chapter 6 Model comparison cooperation Chapter 7 Conclusion and future work