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The integration of the different stakeholder needs and environmental constraints is the key goal of requirements engineering. This demands collaborations between involved parties, to reach “understandability of the system”, what is particularly challenging for collaborations over different organisations. High quality requirements engineering is the key factor to address these challenges. Requirements are input to all development steps and carry the knowledge to exchange—requirements engineering is an overall life-cycle spanning and in its essence a knowledge management task.
The main goal of the T-Reqs framework presented in this thesis is to enable semantic interoperability and to sustain the knowledge by conceptualization of the requirements engineering process applied to European space projects. T-Reqs’ objective is to formally capture the information carried by the requirements to provide top-shelf inputs for the consecutive system and discipline-specific development tasks, in particular within model-based systems engineering. Emphasis is placed on the nature of relationships that exist among requirements and requirement documents. The T-Reqs formalism addresses the structuring of requirements as well as their potential reuse, e.g., in product line development or even between different projects. This implies an overall System Requirements Specification that is distributed in many specifications documents and involves requirements of different levels of abstractions from abstract goals to implementation details. This thesis especially focuses the specification and validation of such requirements documents.
The T-Reqs traceability model provides a means to trace not only individual requirements,
but also consider relations among views such as documents, taking into account the role
they play for stakeholders, especially in reuse. It is shown, how formalization of dependencies, such as for tailoring of standards, enables automated quality checks to facilitate reviews and enhance completeness and consistency of the overall specification.
Towards the structuring of requirements itself, different syntactic template systems aim to
increase the quality of requirement documentation. Within this thesis a comparative evaluation of these notations is conducted, supporting that claim and differentiating the strength and weaknesses of different approaches. Special emphasis is not only laid on documentation quality, but also the usefulness of these semi-formal notations for integration with model-based development methods. This is achieved through the representation of concepts, which can be managed in special contextualised glossaries.
Overall it can be shown that conceptualization of requirements engineering knowledge can support requirements engineering in different aspects and a holistic approach to integrate different tasks lays the foundation for semantic interoperability spanning organizations and life cycle phases.
Context: Tracing is a core competence in requirements engineering. Particularly, in safety & security critical domains, tracing is often not only beneficial but even required by industry or government standards. In the tracing process, linked artifacts and the activities that process or create them are essential. To capture trace link candidates and provide recommendations to developers, it is necessary to identify which artifacts and activities exist and how they relate to one another. However, there is currently no comprehensive overview of safety & security-relevant artifacts and activities.
Objectives: We aim to compile a collection of all relevant artifacts and activities that employ tracing in security- and safety-critical domains. We would also like to suggest potential trace-link candidates to facilitate tracing.
Methods: In our approach, we conduct a literature review and examine the well-documented Corona Warn App as the subject of our investigation.
Results: We examined n=259publications from safety & security-related traceability research for artifacts and activities. We identified and compiled 437 artifact types and 254 activities into a comprehensive data collection. Our findings include (1) the most frequently appearing artifacts and activities, (2) the most common co-appearing artifacts and activities, and (3) the most frequently appearing artifacts and activities related to specific domains such as military defense, aerospace, and software management and (4) an example how to use our collection on an example to the Corona Warn App.
Conclusion: We discuss recommendations for developers, the importance of collaboration and communication in tracing processes, the identification of patterns in artifacts and activities during tracing, and the implications of our findings for industry settings, as well as directions for future work.
