Engineering Requirements for Socio-Technical Systems

社会技术系统的工程要求

• 批准号: RGPIN-2017-06067
• 负责人: Mylopoulos, John
• 金额: $ 3.64万
• 依托单位: University of Toronto
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2019-01-01 至 2020-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=689929
• 关键词: Engineering; Requirements; Socio; Technical; Systems

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.

需求工程（RE）涉及利益相关者需求的获取、建模和分析，以获得系统的规范，并传递给设计人员。RE被广泛认为是软件开发中最关键的阶段，实际上是决定项目成败的阶段。考虑到软件项目持续的高失败率，我们建议通过为RE成为一门工程学科奠定基础来推进RE的研究现状。这些基础基于三项原则：（a）要求代表利益攸关方的需要，并被塑造为目标，由未来的系统来实现;（B）这些目标的转换--无论多么非正式、冲突、模糊等--都将基于一组细化操作符的应用，其中每个应用将一个目标转换为更具体的目标，在Hoare，Abrial等人的精化演算的精神中;（c）转换过程由精化工具支持，该精化工具将一个或多个目标转换为一个或多个更具体的目标;（d）为某一目标模型选择最佳规格时，应辅之以推理工具，该工具应进行合理、完整和可扩展的推理，甚至对于具有数千个元素（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行为者）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，因为这些都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达力，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，我们认为这些机制不能用当前的规范技术来解释，正式或其他。最后，我们有兴趣研究特定类别的要求，旨在（a）将其形式化;（B）根据文献研究可操作性的替代方法。一个这样的类是验收要求类。这些都是形式的要求“X%的社区Y将使用该系统”。这些都是社交软件的关键需求。毕竟，如果一个系统不被使用，它就是一个失败！另一类涉及在提供（基于计算机的）服务时最小化官僚主义开销。对于任何使用过政府服务的人来说，这样的要求是可以理解的，他们会被长时间的等待、长时间的周转、太多的信息被要求，甚至（在一些国家）为了得到你需要的东西而需要贿赂。在这里，我们要描述这种“尽量减少官僚主义”的要求，并研究替代方法，他们可以通过参考文献来实现。