Concern-Driven Requirements for Adaptive Socio-Technical Systems

该研究计划的愿景是在大规模软件重用的基础上构建下一代基于模型的软件需求工程环境，以应对*高影响的社会技术系统*的挑战。这类系统的特点是，具有相互冲突的目标、技术、组织流程以及部署这些系统的不同社会背景的人员之间的复杂相互关联。例如，向数百万没有保险的美国公民提供负担得起的医疗保健就属于这一类，联合国协调世界各地疫苗接种制度的计划也属于这一类。此外，这样的系统需要不断适应不断变化的社会、经济和技术环境，才能保持相关性和实用性。 大型系统必须考虑许多问题(例如，可用性、安全性)。关注点分离是一种能够专注于一个关注点，而暂时忘记所有其他关注点的能力，使人类能够处理此类系统的复杂性。然而，一些被称为“横切关注点”的关注点与许多其他关注点错综复杂地相互关联，这使得单独分析关注点变得困难。现有的高级关注点分离技术通过形式化横切关注点与其他关注点的关系来解决这个问题，这使得能够推理横切关注点对系统的影响。因此，可以通过组成一组可重用的关注点单元来分析和构建系统，而不管关注点是否横切。然而，“关注点驱动的开发”，即跨软件开发阶段的大规模关注点单元的系统应用，尚未得到重大关注。 从软件重用的成功案例中可以学到很多东西，从通用的、小规模的编程库到规划的、大规模的软件产品线(SPL)。SLP是面向产品的，即它们描述了一系列类似的产品，例如一套助听器。这项研究追求的是关注导向--导致*软件关注线*--以最大化潜在的重用利益，因为关注点不仅适用于一个产品系列，而且适用于广泛的产品系列。此外，在从一组类似的、适用于当前上下文的单元中选择可复用单元时，运行时适配的需要需要支持。环境的变化以闪电般的速度在当今的信息世界中传播，这意味着需要迅速做出正确的选择，以进行相关的运行时系统适应。这样的支持还不是现成的。 本研究提出关注点单元，这些关注点单元包括一组处于不同抽象级别的协调的、异质的、可重用的模型，并在组合关注点以适应变化的上下文时尽可能使用最抽象、最高级的需求模型。该研究计划的目标是推进面向关注点的建模语言、框架和工具，用于适应性社会技术系统的需求工程，在可重用关注点单元的帮助下，考虑运行时系统适应的社会、经济和技术背景。 该研究计划的影响是改善了大规模重复使用，从而提高了生产率，导致加拿大软件行业服务的许多组织的创新和竞争力增强。即使在快速发展的软件开发项目的背景下，软件关注线也有望成为加拿大软件业的可行发展选择，并将使软件行业进一步专业化，使软件工程与其他工程学科更加一致。

The research program’s vision is to build the next generation, model-based software requirements engineering environment based on large-scale software reuse to address the challenges of *high-impact, socio-technical systems*. Such systems are characterized by the complex interrelatedness of people with conflicting goals, technology, organizational processes, and the diverse social context in which these systems are deployed. For example, providing affordable health care to millions of uninsured US citizens falls into this category, as does a United Nations program to coordinate vaccination regimes around the world. Furthermore, systems like that need to constantly adapt to the ever changing social, economic, and technical environment to remain relevant and useful. Large-scale systems have to take many concerns into account (e.g., availability, security). Separation of concerns is the ability to concentrate on one concern, while temporarily forgetting about all other concerns, allowing humans to handle the complexities of such systems. However, some concerns, called *crosscutting concerns*, are intricately interconnected with many other concerns, making it difficult to analyze concerns individually. Existing techniques for advanced separation of concerns address this issue by formalizing the relationship of a crosscutting concern with other concerns, which enables reasoning about the impact of a crosscutting concern on a system. Consequently, systems can be analyzed and built by composing a set of reusable concern units, regardless of whether concerns crosscut or not. Nevertheless, *concern-driven development*, i.e., the systematic application of large-scale concern units across software development phases, has not yet received significant attention. Much can be learned from success stories for software reuse, ranging from generic, small-scale programming libraries to planned, large-scale Software Product Lines (SPLs). SPLs are product-oriented, i.e., they describe a family of similar products, e.g., a set of hearing aids. This research pursues concern-orientation instead – leading to *Software Concern Lines* – to maximize the potential reuse benefit, because concerns are applicable to not only one product family but across a wide range of product families. In addition, the need for run-time adaptation requires support when selecting a reusable unit out of a set of similar, applicable ones for the current context. The lightning speed with which changes in context propagate through today’s information world means correct selections need to be made quickly for relevant run-time system adaptation. Such support is not yet readily available. This research proposes concern units that include a set of coordinated, heterogeneous, reusable models at different levels of abstraction and use the most abstract, most high-level requirements model possible when composing concerns to adapt to changed context. The research program’s objective is to advance concern-oriented modeling languages, frameworks, and tools for requirements engineering of adaptive socio-technical systems, taking social, economic, and technical context into account for run-time system adaptation with the help of reusable concern units. The research program’s impact is improved large-scale reuse and hence improved productivity, leading to innovation in and increased competitiveness of the many organizations served by the Canadian software industry. Software Concern Lines are expected to become a viable development choice for the Canadian software industry even in the context of rapidly evolving software development projects, and will allow the software industry to further specialize, bringing software engineering more in line with other engineering disciplines.