Skip to main content

A Semi-automated Approach to Generate an Adaptive Quality Attribute Relationship Matrix

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 12045))

  • 1582 Accesses

Abstract

[Context and Motivation] A critical success factor in Requirements Engineering (RE) involves recognizing conflicts in Quality Requirements (QRs). Nowadays, Quality Attributes Relationship Matrix (QARM) is utilized to identify the conflicts in QRs. The static QARM represents how one Quality Attribute (QA) undermines or supports to achieve other QAs. [Question/Problem] However, emerging technology discovers new QAs. Requirements analysts need to invest significant time and non-trivial human effort to acquire knowledge for the newly discovered QAs and influence among them. This process involves searching and analyzing a large set of quality documents from literature and industries. In addition, the use of static QARMs, without knowing the purpose of the QRs in the system may lead to false conflict identification. Rather than taking all QAs, domain-specific QAs are of great concern for the system being developed. [Principal ideas/results] In this paper, we propose an approach which is aimed to build an adaptive QARM semi-automatically. We empirically evaluate the approach and report an analysis of the generated QARM. We achieve 85.67% recall, 59.07% precision and 69.14% F-measure to acquire knowledge for QAs. [Contributions] We provide an algorithm to acquire knowledge for domain-specific QAs and construct an adaptive QARM from available unconstrained natural language documents and web search engines.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    In this work, the term “Interdependency” indicates the relationship among QAs (i.e. how QAs support or limit one or more QAs).

  2. 2.

    Ontology is a formal description of the concept of sharing, stressing the link between real entities [24]. The ontology helps domain users- to suggest their NFRs effectively and requirements analysts- to understand and model the NFRs accurately. Building ontology based on domain knowledge gives a formal and explicit specification of a shared conceptualization.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/UnnatiS/QARM-Generation/tesoutputfile1.txt.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/UnnatiS/QARM-Generation/.

References

  1. IEEE Computer Society, Software Engineering Standards Committee, and IEEE-SA Standards Board: IEEE recommended practice for software requirements specifications. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Shah, U.S., Patel, S., Jinwala, D.: Specification of non-functional requirements: a hybrid approach. In: REFSQ Workshops (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Guizzardi, R.S.S., Li, F.-L., Borgida, A., Guizzardi, G., Horkoff, J., Mylopoulos, J.: An ontological interpretation of non-functional requirements. In: FOIS, vol. 14, pp. 344–357 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Chung, L., Nixon, B.A., Yu, E., Mylopoulos, J.: Non-Functional Requirements in Software Engineering, 5th edn. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  5. Egyed, A., Grunbacher, P.: Identifying requirements conflicts and cooperation: how quality attributes and automated traceability can help. IEEE Softw. 21(6), 50–58 (2004)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. ISO/IEC 9126-1:2001 Software engineering product quality-part 1: quality model. International Organization for Standardization (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Duque-Ramos, A., Fernández-Breis, J.T., Stevens, R., Aussenac-Gilles, N.: SQuaRE: A SQuaRE-based approach for evaluating the quality of ontologies. J. Res. Pract. Inf. Technol. 43(2), 159 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Mairiza, D., Zowghi, D., Nurmuliani, N.: Managing conflicts among non-functional requirements. In: Workshop on Requirements Engineering, pp. 11–19. University of Technology, Sydney (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Sadana, V., Liu, XF.: Analysis of conflicts among non-functional requirements using integrated analysis of functional and non-functional requirements. In: 31st Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 2007), vol. 1, pp. 215–218. IEEE (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Abdul, H., Jamil, A., Imran, U.: Conflicts identification among non-functional requirements using matrix maps. World Acad. Sci. Eng. Technol. 44, 1004–1009 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Mairiza, D., Zowghi, D., Gervasi, V.: Conflict characterization and analysis of non functional requirements: an experimental approach. In: 12th International Conference on Intelligent Software Methodologies, Tools and Techniques (SoMeT), September 2013, pp. 83–91. IEEE (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Carvalho, R., Andrade, R., Oliveira, K., Kolski, C.: Catalogue of invisibility requirements for UbiComp and IoT applications. In: 26th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE), pp. 88–99. IEEE (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Maia, M.E., Rocha, L.S., Andrade, R.: Requirements and challenges for building service-oriented pervasive middleware. In: Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Pervasive Services, pp. 93–102. ACM (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Carvalho, R.M., de Castro Andrade, R.M., de Oliveira, K.M.: AQUArIUM - a suite of software measures for HCI quality evaluation of ubiquitous mobile applications. J. Syst. Softw. 136, 101–136 (2018)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Serrano, M.: Ubiquitous, pervasive and mobile computing: a reusable-models-based non-functional catalogue objectives of research. In: ER@ BR (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Carvalho, R.M., de Castro Andrade, R.M., de Oliveira, K.M., de Sousa Santos, I., Bezerra, C.I.M.: Quality characteristics and measures for human-computer interaction evaluation in ubiquitous systems. Softw. Q. 25(3), 743–795 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-016-9320-z

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Miguel, J.P., Mauricio, D., Rodríguez, G.: A review of software quality models for the evaluation of software products. Int. J. Softw. Eng. Appl. 5(6), 31–53 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Boehm, B.W., Brown, J.R., Kaspar, H.: Characteristics of Software Quality. North Holland, Amsterdam (1978)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  19. McCall, J.A., Richards, P.K., Walters, G.F.: Factors in Software Quality. Volume I. Concepts and Definitions of Software Quality. General Electric Co., Sunnyvale (1977)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  20. Grady, R.B., Caswell, D.L.: Software Metrics: Establishing a Company-Wide Program. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River (1987)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Dromey, R.G.: A model for software product quality. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 21(2), 146–162 (1995)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Shah, U.S., Jinwala, D.C.: Resolving ambiguities in natural language software requirements: a comprehensive survey. ACM SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes 40(5), 1–7 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Shah, U.S., Jinwala, D.C.: Resolving ambiguity in natural language specification to generate UML diagrams for requirements specification. Int. J. Softw. Eng. Technol. Appl. 1(2–4), 308–334 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Gruber, T.R.: A translation approach to portable ontology specifications. Knowl. Acquis. 5(2), 199–220 (1993)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Islam, A., Inkpen, D.: Semantic text similarity using corpus-based word similarity and string similarity. ACM Trans. Knowl. Discov. Data 2(2), 1–25 (2008). Article No. 10

    Google Scholar 

  26. Banerjee, S., Pedersen, T.: An adapted Lesk algorithm for word sense disambiguation using WordNet. In: Gelbukh, A. (ed.) CICLing 2002. LNCS, vol. 2276, pp. 136–145. Springer, Heidelberg (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45715-1_11

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  27. Jedlitschka, A., Ciolkowski, M., Pfahl, D.: Reporting experiments in software engineering. In: Shull, F., Singer, J., Sjøberg, D.I.K. (eds.) Guide to Advanced Empirical Software Engineering, pp. 201–228. Springer, London (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84800-044-5_8

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Unnati Shah .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Shah, U., Patel, S., Jinwala, D. (2020). A Semi-automated Approach to Generate an Adaptive Quality Attribute Relationship Matrix. In: Madhavji, N., Pasquale, L., Ferrari, A., Gnesi, S. (eds) Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. REFSQ 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12045. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44429-7_17

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44429-7_17

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-44428-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-44429-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics