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Compentence Center Requirements Engineering - Research Areas
 Artefact-based Customisation of Requirements Engineering
Software development projects are characterised by a high variability and an
often missing integration of RE techniques into the development life
cycle. Artefact-based RE tackles this problem since it abstracts from concrete
methods and tools and offers a flexible basis that can be customised. A major
research area is thereby given by the establishment of artefact-based RE
approaches for particular domains of application and the customisation of the
like considering process integration and customisation at the project
level.
Relevant Projects:
RE Analysis at DLH
Contact person: Daniel Méndez Fernández
Transition from Requirements to System Design
In this area we are concerned with the transition from requirements to design. Thereby,
the requirements are the customer’s view onto a system and describe the problem space.
The design is the developer’s view onto a system and describes the solution space.
The usage behaviour is structured hierarchically in so-called service hierarchies.
The step-wise transition to formal models, that enables the validation and verification of
functional requirements, is treated as well. Furthermore we work with artefact models for
requirements and design, with techniques for the further processing of requirements and solution
approaches for the design, for example in the sense of process models and architectural patterns.
Relevant Projects:
BASE XT,
DENTUM,
Mobilsoft,
REMsES
Contact person: Birgit Penzenstadler
Transformation of informal textual requirements in functional models:
The overwhelming majority of requirements is written in natural language.
In industrial practice, requirements documents are often vague and contain
many inconsistencies. Misunderstandings and errors resulting from the requirements
engineering phase influence later project phases and can potentially lead to
a complete project failure. In our research we deal with the problem of
translation of requirements documents written in natural language to formal
models. The obtained results include both static models (glossaries, ontologies),
as well as behavior models (interaction sequences, automata). As an additional
effect, this translation makes errors in the requirements documents apparent.
Making errors apparent is surely at least as valuable as formal models themselves.
Relevant projects:
DENTUM,
Mobilsoft
Contact person:
Requirements Engineering Reference model (REM) and its instance implementation in specific domains
the key-concept, that together with Siemens SCR in Princeton developed RE Reference Model (REM) [REM zusam., REM orig.]
is the orientation to an essential RE Artefact Model – a Model of the acquired contents (Artefact) of the Requirement- and System
specifications (see figure). It guides the Analysis of customer and user requirements, and it allows an essential system concept,
that supports the systematic development and functional Modelling of system requirements. In the model, the specified consistence
and the independent criteria allow the qualitative revision of the specifications and its goal-oriented adjustment to ensure
the layout determination.
Relevant Projects:
REM,
AutoRAID,
REMSES,
Quasar Requirements
Contact person:
Formal methods in requirements quality assurance and behavioural testing of distributed applications in physical environments.
Contact person: Mario Gleirscher
Specification of Software Quality Requirements
Contact person: Klaus Lochmann
Specification of Functional Requirements by Hierarchies and Mode Concepts
Most of today's software systems do not only serve one special purpose but are
designed to provide the user with a lot of functions and use cases, which may also
influence each other's behaviour (feature interaction).
This fact yields the necessity to have powerful and precise modeling techniques and methods that
help the developer to identify, structure and specify a system's functionality.
This can be achieved by describing the system's behaviour that is observable at the
system boundary (Black-Box Behaviour). Additionally, dependencies between system functions have to be made explicit guided with clear semantics.
As part of our research we focus on modeling the system's functionality by means of a service hierarchy.
A service hierarchy is a tree-like structure that consists of system functions.
The behaviour of every function in the tree is a projection of the behaviour of its parent function.
The root function of the tree entails the behaviour of the entire system.
Behaviour specifications need only be given for the atomic functions in the leaf nodes of the tree.
Dependendies between functions often manifest themselves by nondeterministic or inconsistent behaviour.
These dependencies can be resolved by additional communication channels that provide a function with the neccessary information.
Since the dependenices often represent a kind of abstract system state, we also call them modes.
Contact person: Andreas Vogelsang
Our concept of the model based Requirements Engineering supports a
continuous transition of the requirements analysis in the system delineation. According requirement- and model system
are the basis for the implementation, integration and quality assurance during the project development. In these fields
we work intensively together with the following competence centres of the chairs of:
Architecture & Services
Modelbased Development
Process Models
Tool Support
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