Traceability approach for conflict dissolution in handling requirements crosscutting

Abstract

Requirements crosscutting in software development and maintenance has gradually become an important issue in software engineering. There are growing needs of traceability support to achieve some possible understanding in requirements crosscutting throughout phases in software lifecycle. It is aimed to manage practical process in addressing requirements crosscutting at various phases in order to comply with industrial standard. However, due to its distinct nature, many recent works are focusing on identification, modularization, composition and conflict dissolution of requirements crosscutting which are mostly saturated at requirements level. These works fail to practically specify crosscutting properties for functional and nonfunctional requirements at requirements, analysis and design phases. Therefore, this situation leads to inability to provide sufficient support for software engineers to manage requirements crosscutting across the remaining development phases. This thesis proposes a new approach called the Identification, Modularization, Design Composition Rules and Conflict Dissolutions (IM-DeCRuD) that provides a special traceability to facilitate better understanding and reasoning for engineering tasks towards requirements crosscutting during software development and evolution. This study also promotes a simple but significant way to support pragmatic changes of crosscutting properties at requirements, analysis and design phases for medium sizes of software development and maintenance projects. A tool was developed based on the proposed approach to support four main perspectives namely requirements specification definition, requirements specification modification, requirements prioritization setting and graphics visualizing representation. Software design components are generated using Generic Modeling Environment (GME) with Java language interpreter to incorporate all these features. The proposed IM-DeCRuD was applied to an industrial strength case study of medium-scaled system called myPolicy. The tool was evaluated and the results were verified by some experts for validation and opinion. The feedbacks were then gathered and analyzed using DESMET qualitative method. The outcomes show that the IM-DeCRuD is applicable to address some tedious job of engineering process in handling crosscutting properties at requirements, analysis and design phases for system development and evolution.