Abstract
Literature mainly focuses the adaptation of any requirements engineering process on the possible variations of elicitation techniques, mainly due to information sources characteristics. However, these particularities, usually called situational factors, are seldom considered in other activities of the requirements process. Most situational factors, when considered in software projects, have a high influence on the requirements process. Therefore, the different situations that may attempt against or may favor a successful requirements process should be identified at the beginning of the project. Additionally, some of such factors may evolve along software development life cycle; this should motivate a reengineering of the requirements process at some strategic milestones. In this chapter, a process for constructing and dynamically adapting a requirements process is proposed, focusing on the evolving factors. The process follows rules based on different combinations of situational factors at specific control points and manages a repository of process blocks to perform the tailoring.
TopBackground
To follow a process guiding the development of an engineering project or system is valuable enough since it means that performing a predictable set of activities using techniques helps to get the outcome within a controllable quality.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Natural Language Model: A model built using a minimun set of structural components and completed with slightly restricted natural language text.
Situational Method Engineering: A discipline that promotes the construction of methods for developing systems according to a pre-defined set of situational factors.
Process variability: The variant elements of a process, identified at variation points, which produce deviation from the standard process.
Process Commonality: The common elements of a process that facilitate the definition of a family of processes through reuse.
Process Block: A well-defined unit of process that can be reused as part of any process.
Scenario: A representation of an observed or envisioned situation in the application context.
Variation Point: Specific location at a process where situational factors are evaluated and changes to the standard process are applied.
Requirements Engineering Process: A process to construct software requirements by means of methods, techniques and tools during elicitation, modeling, analyzing and evolution of requirements.
Situational Factor: A characteristic of the project or the application context that may be taken into account when defining an RE process.