Engineering Requirements for Socio-Technical Systems

需求工程（RE）关注涉众需求的引出、建模和分析，以便为将来的系统导出规范，并传递给设计师。RE被广泛认为是软件开发中最关键的阶段，是决定项目成败的关键阶段。考虑到软件项目持续的高失败率，我们建议通过为使可再生能源成为一门工程学科奠定基础，努力推进可再生能源的研究现状。******这些基础基于三个原则：(a)需求代表利益相关者的需求，并以目标为模型，由未来系统实现；(b)这些目标的转换——无论多么非正式、冲突、模糊等等——都是基于一组细化算子的应用，其中每个应用将目标转换为更具体的目标，这非常符合Hoare、Abrial等人的细化演算的精神；(c)转换过程由将一个或多个目标转换为一个或几个更具体的目标的改进工具支持；(d)为给定的目标模型选择最佳规格时，应当有一种推理工具来支持，这种推理工具可以进行健全、完整和可扩展的推理，甚至对于具有数千个要素（节点和链接）的目标模型也是如此。我们建议在这样的基础上工作，考虑到社会技术系统（由软件组成的系统，但也包括业务流程和人类参与者）以及涉及软件和物理组件的网络物理系统，例如机器人设备，因为这些是软件工程的重要应用领域。******除了这些基础之外，我们建议重新审视需求规范语言，着眼于使它们更具表现力，以便它们能够表达软件工程实践中使用的安全性、性能和其他机制，在我们看来，这些都不能用当前的规范技术来解释，无论是正式的还是其他的。******最后，我们对研究特定类别的需求感兴趣，旨在(a)形式化它们；(b)根据文献研究实施这些措施的其他方法。其中一类是验收要求类。这些需求的形式是“社区Y的X%将使用该系统”。它们是社交软件的关键需求。毕竟，如果一个系统没有被使用，它就是一个失败！另一类涉及最小化提供（基于计算机的）服务的官僚开销。对于使用过政府服务的人来说，这样的要求是可以理解的，因为他们曾被长时间的等待、长时间的周转、要求的信息太多、（在某些国家）甚至需要贿赂才能得到你想要的东西所困扰。在这里，我们想要描述这种“最小化官僚主义”的要求，并研究通过参考文献来实现这些要求的替代方法。

Requirements Engineering (RE) is concerned with the elicitation, modelling and analysis of stakeholder requirements in order to derive a specification for a system-to-be, to be passed on to designers. RE is widely considered the most critical stage in software development, literally the one that makes or breaks projects. Given persisting high failure rates for software projects, we propose to work towards advancing the state-of-research in RE by laying the foundations for making RE an engineering discipline.******These foundations are based on three principles: (a) Requirements represent stakeholder needs and are modelled as goals, to be fulfilled by the system-to-be; (b) The transformation of these goals -- however informal, conflicting, vague, etc. is to be based on the application of a set of refinement operators, where each application transforms a goal into a more concrete one, much in the spirit of the Refinement Calculus of Hoare, Abrial, et al; (c ) The transformation process is be supported by refinement tools that transform one or more goals into one or several more concrete ones; (d) The selection of optimal specifications for a given goal model should be supported by a reasoning tool that carried out sound, complete and scalable reasoning, even for goal models with thousands of elements (nodes and links). We are proposing to work on such foundations having in mind socio-technical systems (systems that consist of software, but also business processes and human actors) as well as cyber-physical systems that involve both software and physical components, e.g., robotic devices, because these are important application areas for software engineering.******In addition to these foundations, we propose to revisit requirements specification languages with an eye towards making them more expressive so that they can express security, performance and other mechanisms used in software engineering practice, which in our view cannot be accounted by current specification techniques, formal or otherwise.******Finally, we are interested in studying specific classes of requirements, aiming to (a) formalize them; (b) study alternatives ways of operationalizing them, based on the literature. One such class is the class of acceptance requirements. These are requirements of the form “X% of community Y will use the system”. They are critical requirements for social software. After all, if a system isn't used, it is a failure! Another class concerns minimizing bureaucratic overhead in offering a (computer-based) service. Such requirements are understandable to anyone who has used a government service and was bothered by long waits, long turn-arounds, too much information being requested, and (in some countries) even the need to bribe in order to get what you need. Here, we want to characterize such “minimize bureaucracy” requirements and study alternative ways they can be fulfilled by referring to the literature.