Xavier Franch

Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya | UPC · Department of Service and Information System Engineering (ESSI)

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Sciences, RCIS 2022, which took place in Barcelona, Spain, during May 17–20, 2022. It focused on the special theme "Ethics and Trustworthiness in Information Science".

iStar2.0 provides a recommendation for the core constructs defined in the i* language, which are articulated around a metamodel. When applying iStar2.0 to a particular domain, it can be necessary to extend this metamodel in order to represent more specialized concepts. One of these domains is that of data structures, as implementation of abstract d...

Context: Managing Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) in software projects is challenging, and projects that adopt Model-Driven Development (MDD) are no exception. Although several methods and techniques have been proposed to face this challenge, there is still little evidence on how NFRs are handled in MDD by practitioners. Knowing more about the s...

Software and data analytics solutions support improving development processes and the quality of the software produced in Agile Software Development (ASD). However, decision makers in software teams (e.g., product owner, project manager) are demanding powerful tools providing evidence data that support their strategic decision-making processes. In...

Summary of the tutorial given at RCIS'20. Published as part of the back matter of the proceedings. Cite as: Franch, X.: Data-Driven Requirements Engineering: Principles, Methods and Challenges. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS 2020). LNBIP 385: 625-626, Springer, 2020.

Quality requirements (QRs) are a key artifact needed to ensure the quality and success of a software system. Despite their importance, QRs rarely get the same degree of attention as their functional counterpart in agile software development (ASD) projects. Moreover, crucial information that can be obtained from software development repositories (e....

Context. Situational Method Engineering (SME) is the discipline that aims at the systematic definition of methods adapted to specific contexts of use (situations). The use of goal-oriented methods for supporting SME is an active research line where the iStar 2.0 language is applied. Objective. We plan to conduct an experiment to investigate some de...

This paper explores the use of the i* language as a notation to describe data structures to be used in classical imperative programs written in e.g. Java or C#. Data structures are described at two levels of abstraction, their specification and their implementation (the data structure properly said). We analyze how iStar 2.0, enriched with both mod...

Context: Agile software development has become commonplace in software development companies due to the numerous benefits it provides. However, conducting Agile projects is demanding in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), because projects start and end quickly, but still have to fulfil customers’ quality requirements. Objective: This paper aims at...

[Context and motivation] Modern software engineering processes have shifted from traditional upfront requirements engineering (RE) to a more continuous way of conducting RE, particularly including data-driven approaches. [Question/problem] However, current research on data-driven RE focuses more on leveraging certain techniques such as natural lang...

[Context and motivation] Requirements reuse has been proposed as a key asset for requirements engineers to efficiently elicit, validate and document software requirements and, as a consequence, obtain requirements specifications of better quality through more effective engineering processes. [Question/problem] Regardless the impact requirements reu...

Context: Autonomous Systems (ASs) are becoming increasingly pervasive in today's society. One reason lies in the emergence of sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions that boost the ability of ASs to self-adapt in increasingly complex and dynamic environments. Companies dealing with AI models in ASs face several problems, such as users'...

Context:Quality requirements (QRs) describe the desired quality of software, and they play an important role in the success of software projects. In agile software development (ASD), QRs are often ill-defined and not well addressed due to the focus on quickly delivering functionality. Rapid software development (RSD) approaches (e.g., continuous de...

Most of the current self-adaptive systems (SASs) rely on static feedback loops such as the IBM’s MAPE-K loop for managing their adaptation process. Static loops do not allow SASs to react to runtime events such as changing adaptation requirements or MAPE-K elements’ faults. In order to address this issue, some solutions have emerged for manually or...

Context: Quality requirements (QRs) describe the desired quality of software, and they play an important role in the success of software projects. In agile software development (ASD), QRs are often ill-defined and not well addressed due to the focus on quickly delivering functionality. Rapid software development (RSD) approaches (e.g., continuous d...

Software quality poses continuously new challenges in software development, including aspects related to both software development and system usage, which significantly impact the success of software systems. The Q-Rapids H2020 project defines an evidence-based, data-driven quality-aware rapid software development methodology. Quality requirements...

Requirements reuse is still today a difficult goal to achieve. One particular context in which requirements reuse may give more benefits than costs is that of call for tenders projects, due to the similarity of the requirements documents (which take the form of requests for proposal documents, RfPs) from one project to another. In this paper, we pr...

iStar2.0 has been proposed as a standard language for building goal-and agent-oriented models. It is an evolution of the former i* language, with the purpose of homogenising existing syntactical and semantic variations of basic i* constructs that researchers in the field introduced along the years. In its first version (2016), iStar2.0 was intentio...

The software development process is an intricate task, with the growing complexity of software solutions and inflating code-line count being part of the reason for the fall of software code coherence and readability thus being one of the causes for software faults and it’s declining quality. Debugging software during development is significantly le...

Quality Requirements (QRs) are a key artifact to ensure the quality and success of a software system. Despite its importance, QRs have not reached the same degree of attention as its functional counterparts, especially in the context of trending software development methodologies like Agile Software Development (ASD). Moreover, crucial information...

In the last decade, modern data analytics technologies have enabled the creation of software analytics tools offering real-time visualization of various aspects related to software development and usage. These tools seem to be particularly attractive for companies doing agile software development. However, the information provided by the available...

Context-aware computing is the ability of Services and applications to adapt and react to context changes. Context modelling is a core feature of context-aware computing. Although a lot of research has been made in the field of context modelling, most of the context-aware computing proposals prefer to design their own customized context model inste...

[Context & motivation] Bidding processes are a usual requirement elicitation instrument for large IT or infrastructure projects. An organization or agency issues a Request for Proposal (RFP) and interested companies may submit compliant offers. [Problem] Such RFPs comprise natural language documents of several hundreds of pages with requirements of...

Proceedings available at: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2376/

Nowadays, there exist a plethora of different educational syllabi for Requirements Engineering (RE), all aiming at incorporating practically relevant educational units (EUs). Many of these syllabi are based, in one way or the other, on the syllabi provided by the International Requirements Engineering Board (IREB), a non-profit organisation devoted...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement, PROFES 2019, held in Barcelona, Spain, in November 2019. The 24 revised full papers and 11 short papers presented together with 10 workshop papers, and 5 tutorial summaries were carefully reviewed and selected from 6...

In this document, we describe how the SALI solution has been tested at AstaZero, what are the preliminary results and the conclusions of our work as well as which are the lessons learned and how was our experience at the test track. Planned publications and disseminations activities are included at the end of the document as well as more details ab...

Background: Requirement engineering is often considered a critical activity in system development projects. The increasing complexity of software as well as number and heterogeneity of stakeholders motivate the development of methods and tools for improving large-scale requirement engineering. Aims: The empirical study presented in this paper aim t...

Ontology integration addresses the problem of reconciling into one single semantic framework different knowledge chunks defined according to its own ontology. This field has been subject of analysis and many consolidated theoretical results are available. Still, in practice, ontology integration is difficult in heterogeneous information systems (HI...

As part of the growing interest in natural language processing for requirements engineering (RE), RE researchers, computational linguists, and industry practitioners met at the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Requirements Engineering (NLP4RE 18). This article summarizes the workshop and presents an overview of the discussion held...

Context: Software evolution ensures that software systems in use stay up to date and provide value for end-users. However, it is challenging for requirements engineers to continuously elicit needs for systems used by heterogeneous end-users who are out of organisational reach. Objective: We aim at supporting continuous requirements elicitation by c...

Background: Requirement engineering is often considered a critical activity in system development projects. The increasing complexity of software, as well as number and heterogeneity of stakeholders, motivate the development of methods and tools for improving large-scale requirement engineering. Aims: The empirical study presented in this paper aim...

Any software development process needs to consider non-functional requirements (NFR) in order to deliver a system that complies with its stakeholders’ expectations. In a previous mapping study about model-driven development (MDD) for service-oriented architectures (SOA) we found a limited number of approaches managing NFR. The present work aims at...

(preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.00711) Context: Adaptive monitoring is a method used in a variety of domains for responding to changing conditions. It has been applied in different ways, from monitoring systems' customization to re-composition, in different application domains. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no studies anal...

Software quality is an essential competitive factor for the success of software companies today. Increasing the software quality levels of software products and services requires an adequate integration of quality requirements (QRs) in the software life-cycle, which is still scarcely supported in current rapid software development (RSD) approaches....

An empirical study is an investigation, using established procedures (also called “empirical research methods”), for the purpose of gaining knowledge through observation. Empirical studies lie at the heart of Software Engineering (SE). The quality of these studies is a determinant of the validity of the research findings, including that of the comp...

Conducting empirical research in software engineering industry is a process, and as such, it should be generalizable. The aim of this paper is to discuss how academic researchers may address some of the challenges they encounter during conducting empirical research in the software industry by means of a systematic and structured approach. The proto...

[Context & motivation] Requirements Engineering (RE) is considered as one of the most critical phases in software development but still many challenges remain open. [Problem] Recommender systems have been applied to solve open RE challenges like requirements and stakeholder discovery; however, the existent proposals focus on specific RE tasks and d...

This article summarizes the RE in the Age of Continuous Deployment panel at the 25th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference. It highlights two synergistic points (user stories and linguistic tooling) and one challenge (nonfunctional requirements) in fast-paced, agile-like projects, and recommends how to carry on the dialogue.

All proceedings freely available in CEUR, Vol. 2075. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2075/

Runtime uncertainty such as unpredictable resource unavailability, changing environmental conditions and user needs, as well as system intrusions or faults represents one of the main current challenges of self-adaptive systems. Moreover, today's systems are increasingly more complex, distributed, decentralized, etc. and therefore have to reason abo...

Requirements engineering is a discipline with numerous challenges to overcome. One of these challenges is the implementation of requirements reuse approaches. Although several theoretical proposals exist, little is known about the practices that are currently adopted in industry. Our goal is to contribute to the investigation of the state of the pr...

Non-functional requirements (NFRs) are determinant for the success of software projects. However,they are characterized as hard to define, and in agile software development(ASD), are often given less priority and usually not documented. In this paper, we present the findings of the documentation practices and challenges of NFRs in companies utilizi...

Strategic decision making is the process of selecting a logical and informed choice from the alternative options based on key strategic indicators determining the success of a specific organization strategy. To support this process and provide a common underlying language, in this work, we present an empirically-grounded ontology to support differe...

Management of Quality Requirements (QRs) is determinant for the success of software projects. However, this management is currently under-considered in software projects and in particular, in agile methods. Although agile processes are focused on the functional aspects of the software, some agile practices can be beneficial for the management of QR...

The definition of the context of a system is one of the most relevant activities in the early phases of information systems engineering. It allows system engineers to narrow the system scope, by defining well established system boundaries. In practice, outlining a system context model is complex and cumbersome. In order to support context modeling,...

Requirements identification, specification and management are key activities in the software development process. In the last years, many approaches to these activities have emerged, based on the exploitation of huge amounts of data gathered from software repositories and system usage. The Q-Rapids project proposes the collection and analysis of su...

Context: Open source software (OSS) and software ecosystems (SECOs) are two consolidated research areas in software engineering. OSS influences the way organizations develop, acquire, use and commercialize software. SECOs have emerged as a paradigm to understand dynamics and heterogeneity in collaborative software development. For this reason, SECO...

Context: Big Data systems are a class of software systems that ingest, store, process and serve massive amounts of heterogeneous data, from multiple sources. Despite their undisputed impact in current society, their engineering is still in its infancy and companies find it difficult to adopt them due to their inherent complexity. Existing attempts...

Available at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1848

The relevance of Requirements Engineering (RE) research to practitioners is a prerequisite for problem-driven research in the area and key for a long-term dissemination of research results to everyday practice. To better understand how industry practitioners perceive the practical relevance of RE research, we have initiated the RE-Pract project, an...

Context: Service-oriented computing and context-aware computing are two consolidated paradigms that are changing the way of providing and consuming software services. Whilst service-oriented computing is based on service-oriented architectures for providing flexible software services, context-aware computing articulates different phases of a contex...

Several notations have been proposed in the last decades to support information system architecting, design and implementation. Although some of them have been widely adopted, their practical application remains cumbersome. Reasons are manifold: ambiguous semantics, confusing graphical representation, lack of safe guidelines, etc. In this paper, we...

AbstractContext Software Reference Architectures (SRAs) play a fundamental role for organizations whose business greatly depends on the efficient development and maintenance of complex software applications. However, little is known about the real value and risks associated with SRAs in industrial practice. Objective To investigate the current indu...

Context and Motivation: Rapid software development (RSD) refers to the organizational capability to develop, release, and learn from software in rapid cycles without compromising its quality. To achieve RSD, it is essential to understand and manage software quality along the software lifecycle. Question/Problem: Despite the numerous information sou...

Software release planning is the activity of deciding what is to be implemented, when and by who. It can be divided into two tasks: strategic planning (i.e., the what) and operational (i.e., the when and the who). Replan, the tool that we present in this demo, handles both tasks in an integrated and flexible way, allowing its users (typically softw...

Software release planning (SRP) is the problem of selecting which features or requirements will be included in the next release or releases. It is a crucial step in software development, which happens to be extremely complex given the need to reconcile multiple decision making criteria, (e.g., business value, effort and cost), while considering sev...

Motivated by the need of new and innovative methods and techniques for effectively and efficiently analyzing, planning and applying monitoring infrastructures' reconfiguration at runtime, in this work, we explore new and existing solutions, and propose an ongoing Monitoring Reconfiguration approach

Goal-oriented requirements engineering promotes the use of goals to elicit, elaborate, structure, specify, analyze, negotiate, document, and modify requirements. Thus, goal-oriented specifications are essential for capturing the objectives that the system to be developed should achieve. However, the application of goal-oriented specifications into...

Technology integration can be understood as a conceptual process of matching technology features with business requirements. This process may involve subsuming several technology features and business requirements under the same common denominator in order to be matched, therefore we need an approach capable to reconcile them in a coherent and easy...

This book draws new attention to domain-specific conceptual modeling by presenting the work of thought leaders who have designed and deployed specific modeling methods. It provides hands-on guidance on how to build models in a particular domain, such as requirements engineering, business process modeling or enterprise architecture. In addition to t...

i* is a widespread framework in the software engineering field that supports goal-oriented modeling of socio-technical systems and organizations. At its heart lies a language offering concepts such as actor, dependency, goal and decomposition. i* models resemble a network of interconnected, autonomous, collaborative and dependable strategic actors....

Organizations are increasingly becoming Open Source Software (OSS) adopters, either as a result of a strategic decision or just as a consequence of technological choices. The strategy followed to adopt OSS shapes organizations’ businesses; therefore methods to assess such impact are needed. In this paper, we propose OSSAP, a method for defining OSS...

The i* modeling language was introduced to fill the gap in the spectrum of conceptual modeling languages, focusing on the intentional (why?), social (who?), and strategic (how? how else?) dimensions. i* has been applied in many areas, e.g., healthcare, security analysis, eCommerce. Although i* has seen much academic application, the diversity of ex...

This technical report is part of QuESo-V2.0 a quality model for open source software ecosystems (OSSECOs). Our prior efforts have focused on providing a detailed list of the quality measures found during the execution of a systematic mapping on OSSECOs. In this new version of the model, we addressing some of the issues that were highlighted in the...

One of the most critical activities in software product development is the decisional process that assigns features to subsequent releases under technical, resource, risk, and budget constraints. This decision-centric process is referred to as software release planning (SRP). This briefing will expose a state of the art on SRP. A survey of the most...

Adopting Open Source Software (OSS) components offers many advantages to organizations but also introduces risks related to the intrinsic fluidity of the OSS development projects. Choosing the right components is a critical decision, as it could contribute to the success of any adoption process. Making the right decision requires to evaluate the te...

Open source software (OSS) has increasingly played a leading role in current information technology practices. Its pervasive adoption is not without risks for an industry that has experienced significant failures in product quality, timelines and delivery costs. Inadequate risk management has been identified among the top deficiencies when implemen...

Nowadays, lots of service providers offer predictive services that show in advance a condition or occurrence about the future. As a consequence, it becomes necessary for service customers to select the predictive service that best satisfies their needs. The QuPreSS reference model provides a standard solution for the selection of predictive service...

The i* Framework, facilitating goal-oriented information systems modeling, has received much attention in research since its introduction. As the i* and related frameworks (e.g., GRL and Tropos) have been in existence for more than 20 years, researchers around the world have accumulated experience in teaching such languages, at both the undergradua...