Springer Science and Business Media LLC

 Following are some observations about why the real requirements for the product often go undiscovered. We will address this by focusing on the different concerns of the people involved in requirements.

Digital motivation refers to the use of software-based solutions to change, enhance, or maintain people’s attitude and behaviour towards specific tasks, policies, and regulations. Gamification, persuasive technology, and entertainment computing are example strands of such a paradigm. Digital motivation has unique properties which necessitate careful consideration of its analysis design methods. This stems from the strong human factor involvement, and if it is not implemented effectively, it can result in digital motivation being perceived negatively or leading to reduced motivation. The emerging literature on the topic includes approaches for creating digital motivation solutions. However, their primary focus is on specifying its operation, for example, the design of feedback, rewards and levels. In this paper, we propose a novel modelling language which enables capturing digital motivation as an integral part of the organisational and social structure of a business, captured via goal models. We also demonstrate how modelling of motivational techniques at this level, the goal level, enables a more powerful analysis that informs the introduction, design and management of digital motivation. Finally, we evaluate the language and its analysis using different perspectives and quality measures and report the results.

By increasing the importance of the performance in industrial and business software systems, efficient approaches to model-based performance engineering are becoming an inherent part of the development life cycle. Performance engineering at abstract levels of the software development process has an important effect on concluding the success of the software by obtaining the knowledge of optimal alternative designs. This paper introduces the performance-driven software development approach and a prediction technique that regards performance quality attributes at the abstract levels of the software development in an incremental refinement manner. The approach provides Z-based specification formalism at the meta-model level in which its instance models are automatically transformed into the formal performance analytical model, called refinable state machine (RSM). This paper analyses the throughput of a RSM by performing an approximation algorithm on two experimental case studies to determine weights of subjective performance characteristics. The approach can use the inherent performance parameters according to product usage and derive an incremental probabilistic policy determination method under design decisions in the performance plan hierarchy. The results exhibit significant support of abstract level performance profiling in terms of the throughput values.

Ready or not, the digitalization of information has come, and privacy is standing out there, possibly at stake. Although digital privacy is an identified priority in our society, few systematic, effective methodologies exist that deal with privacy threats thoroughly. This paper presents a comprehensive framework to model privacy threats in software-based systems. First, this work provides a systematic methodology to model privacy-specific threats. Analogous to STRIDE, an information flow–oriented model of the system is leveraged to guide the analysis and to provide broad coverage. The methodology instructs the analyst on what issues should be investigated, and where in the model those issues could emerge. This is achieved by (i) defining a list of privacy threat types and (ii) providing the mappings between threat types and the elements in the system model. Second, this work provides an extensive catalog of privacy-specific threat tree patterns that can be used to detail the threat analysis outlined above. Finally, this work provides the means to map the existing privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) to the identified privacy threats. Therefore, the selection of sound privacy countermeasures is simplified.

High-quality requirements minimize the risk of propagating defects to later stages of the software development life cycle. Achieving a sufficient level of quality is a major goal of requirements engineering. This requires a clear definition and understanding of requirements quality. Though recent publications make an effort at disentangling the complex concept of quality, the requirements quality research community lacks identity and clear structure which guides advances and puts new findings into an holistic perspective. In this research commentary, we contribute (1) a harmonized requirements quality theory organizing its core concepts, (2) an evaluation of the current state of requirements quality research, and (3) a research roadmap to guide advancements in the field. We show that requirements quality research focuses on normative rules and mostly fails to connect requirements quality to its impact on subsequent software development activities, impeding the relevance of the research. Adherence to the proposed requirements quality theory and following the outlined roadmap will be a step toward amending this gap.

Use cases are effective techniques to express the 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 behaviour 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 an 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 the semantic analysis of use cases is also reported.