Software Engineering || Net-Centric Computing || Postdoc & Visiting Scholars

   NET-CENTRIC REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING

         Requirements engineering (RE) is an important and necessary part of software development process, which helps designers and customers to develop requirements through an iterative cooperative process of   analyzing the problem, documenting the resulting observations in a variety of representation formats, and checking the accuracy of the understanding gained. If these stakeholders of the same software project  allocate in different places, and are isolated from one another by distance and by time, a collaborative tool must be designed to support such a distributed RE process.

          The distributed RE process demands specific collaboration tools, called groupware, to support effective cooperation between stakeholders. The development of such groupware tools to support cooperative software development is at beginning. Few systems have been proposed, especially, for requirements engineering. Also there is a growing interest to support cooperative software development over the Internet. This could allow for the cooperation among widely-dispersed working groups, whose members may be in different organizations and different countries. In the last years some systems supporting this approach began to appear \cite. However, those tools are not for requirements engineering.

          This research is to use the Internet and mobile agent technologies to support collaboration in distributed RE. There are so many issues in the area of distributed RE, and it is impossible for one researcher to solve all of them. Thus, this research focuses on one of these issues - requirements evolution. First of all, the object oriented method is used to represent requirements and other related project artifacts, and to define the relations between them. Since the software artifacts such as designers and even requirements could be in a distributed environment, a name space system should be established to manage and retrieve these artifacts. Additionally, to apply mobile agent technologies in distributed RE process, agent architecture, which can support such a process, is also presented. Based on the architecture, a formal system architecture, which is built via Colored Petri net will be given. Such architecture will also include the interface with various existing requirement management tools, such as DOORS, since lots of work, especially, for local requirement management, was well done by those tools.

International Center for Software Engineering

Iowa State Univerisity,  Department of Computer Science

226 Atanasoff Hall, Ames, IA 50011

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Copyright © 2002, Prof. Carl K. Chang