Abstract
There are several best practices and proposals that help to design and develop software systems immune (to some extent) to combinatorial effects as these systems evolve. Normalized Systems theory, considered at the software architecture level, is one of such proposals. However, at the requirements engineering (RE)-level, little research has been done regarding this issue. This paper discusses examples related with this problem considering two distinct RE abstract levels, namely at the business and system levels. The examples provided follow the notations and techniques typical used to model the software system at such levels, namely DEMO/EO, BPMN, and UML (Use Cases and Class diagrams). The analysis of these examples suggests that combinatorial effects can be easily found at these different levels. This paper also proposes a research agenda to further investigate this matter in terms of the effects of combinatorial effects, and envisions the mechanisms and solutions for dealing with them. It is suggested that an artifact-based, domain-specific approach is best suited to achieve highly agile enterprises and RE-processes in the future.
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Verelst, J., Silva, A.R., Mannaert, H., Ferreira, D.A., Huysmans, P. (2013). Identifying Combinatorial Effects in Requirements Engineering. In: Proper, H.A., Aveiro, D., Gaaloul, K. (eds) Advances in Enterprise Engineering VII. EEWC 2013. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 146. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38117-1_7
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