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Anticipating Change in Requirements Engineering

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Relating Software Requirements and Architectures

Abstract

Requirements change is inevitable in the development and maintenance of software systems. One way to reduce the adverse impact of change is by anticipating change during requirements elicitation, so that software architecture components that are affected by the change are loosely coupled with the rest of the system. This chapter proposes Change-oriented Requirements Engineering (CoRE), a method to anticipate change by separating requirements into layers that change at relatively different rates. From the most stable to the most volatile, the layers are: patterns, functional constraints, non-functional constraints, and business policies and rules. CoRE is empirically evaluated by applying it to a large-scale software system, and then studying the requirements change from development to maintenance. Results show that CoRE accurately anticipates the relative volatility of the requirements.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    From this point on, the word “archetype” is used when referring specifically to the patterns by Arlow and Neustadt [2].

  2. 2.

    A leaf goal is a goal without subgoals.

  3. 3.

    http://www.ucl.ac.uk/isd/community/projects/azlist-projects

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank members of the Estates and Facilities Division and Information Services Division at University College London for the RALIC project documentation, their discussions and feedback on the requirements models, as well as Peter Bentley, Fuyuki Ishikawa, Emmanuel Letier, and Eric Platon for their feedback on the work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University College London, London, WC1E 6BT, UK

    Soo Ling Lim & Anthony Finkelstein

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  1. Soo Ling Lim
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  2. Anthony Finkelstein
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Correspondence to Soo Ling Lim .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Groningen, Nijenborgh 9, Groningen, 9747, Netherlands

    Paris Avgeriou

  2. Faculty of Information, Swinburne University of Technology, PO Box 218, Victoria, 3122, Australia

    John Grundy

  3. The Open University, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK

    Jon G. Hall

  4. Dept. Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1081 A, Amsterdam, 1081 HV, Netherlands

    Patricia Lago

  5. Werderstr. 45, Heidelberg, 69120, Germany

    Ivan Mistrík

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Lim, S.L., Finkelstein, A. (2011). Anticipating Change in Requirements Engineering. In: Avgeriou, P., Grundy, J., Hall, J.G., Lago, P., Mistrík, I. (eds) Relating Software Requirements and Architectures. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21001-3_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21001-3_3

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-21001-3

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