Representing and selecting patterns remains largely an empirical task. It is difficult to recognize when to apply a given pattern, as well as the consequences its application could generate. This creates the need for extensions to the existing pattern representation. Elsewhere, we have proposed an explicit representation of the forces involved in a pattern and their interrelationships. It inter...

A collaborative system is a software allowing several users to work together and carry out collaboration, communication and coordination tasks. To perform these tasks, the users have to be aware of other user’s actions, usually by means of a set of awareness techniques. However, when these systems have to be specified for development severe difficulties emerge to describe the requirements assoc...

System specifications should be refined to meet stakeholders’ requirements as much as possible, because the first specification does not satisfy all stakeholders in general. This paper presents a procedure to refine behavioral specification to satisfy stakeholders. Non-functional requirements are used for checking stakeholders’ satisfaction. With this procedure, stakeholder-dissatisfaction can ...

Non-functional requirements (NFRs) are rarely taken in account in most software development. There are some reasons that can help us to understand why these requirements are not explicitly dealt with: their complexity, NFRs are usually stated only informally, their high abstraction level and the rare support of languages, methodologies and tools. In this scenario, we concentrate on defining a l...

In the area of requirements engineering there are elicitation techniques that are based on business context to identify the software requirements. However, these techniques do not commonly use business processes models as a source of information relevant to the elicitation of requirements. Such techniques extract use cases from business processes models. However, before modeling use cases, it i...

A taxonomy is introduced and used as a backdrop against which current state-of-the-art in the requirements engineering field is reviewed. The emphasis is on identifying general trends and issues rather than offering the reader a literature survey. The contents of a requirements specification is presented in light of the consensus reached by both theoreticians and practitioners. The desirable pr...

Many organizations are struggling between the fast delivery of new software and quality assurance. Software testing play a key part in the quality assurance of software systems. Formal testing techniques increase software quality and, at the same time, reduce software development cycle time. This article presents a methodology for the identification and definition of black box test cases based ...

The aspect oriented development area is widening its scope, addressing all phases of the software development process. Indeed, recent proposals have looked at the requirements stage, trying to separate at the requirements documents the aspects (non functional requirements) that are spread and tangled with functional requirements. However, we are not aware of any proposals do evaluate the qualit...

We present a modeland pattern-based method that allows software engineers to take quality requirements into account right from the beginning of the software development process. The method comprises requirements analysis as well as the derivation of a software architecture from requirements documents. In that architecture, quality requirements are reflected explicitly. For requirements analysis...

According to the Singapore Framework, any development of a Dublin Core Application Profile (DCAP) has to include the creation of a domain model. DC Scholarly Works Application Profile (SWAP) was the first one explicitly using Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) model in creating its domain model. FRBR has recently been extended with Functional Requirements for Authority Dat...