D.3.3 ALGORITHMS FOR INCREMENTAL ... - SecureChange

Understanding How to Manage Requirements
Evolution: An Experience in the Air Traffic Domain ⋆
F. Paci 1 , M.S. Tran 1 , F. Massacci 1 , D. Nagaraj 1 , and A. Tedeschi 2
1 DISI - University of Trento,
{paci, tran, massacci,nagaraj}@disi.unitn.it
2 Deep Blue
alessandra.tedeschi@dblue.it
Abstract. [Context/Motivation] Requirements evolution is still a major problem
in practice. Continuously changing requirements make the traceability of
requirements difficult and the monitoring of requirements unreliable.[Question/
Problem] In this paper we tackle the problem of modeling and reasoning about
requirements evolution. Our research objectives are to gain in-depth understanding
of the change management process adopted in a real industrial setting, and
investigate how the approach to model and reason on requirements evolution previously
proposed in [15] can facilitate the industrial change management process.
[Principal Ideas/Results]This paper presents the results of the qualitative
user study we have conducted in the air traffic management (ATM) domain where
change management is still an open issue [13]. The user study has involved eight
ATM domain experts in the assessment of the approach to requirement evolution.
[Contribution] The results from the study demonstrated the usefulness of the
approach to requirements evolution in the ATM industrial setting. Furthermore,
important lessons were learned about the key aspects of the approach to evolution
and about the aspects to be taken into account during research methodology’s
design.
Keywords: requirement engineering, evolution, change management, user study, air
traffic domain
1 Introduction
The requirements for any non-trivial system will inevitably change, not only after the
system has been built, but also during the process of implementing the system. Changes
make the traceability of requirements hard and the monitoring of requirements unreliable:
requirements management is difficult, time-consuming and error-prone when done
manually. Thus, change management is a major problem in practice. However, very few
empirical studies [6, 16, 9, 10, 3] about requirements evolution have been reported.
This paper presents the results of a user study conducted about modeling and reasoning
on requirements evolution. The study has been carried out using a qualitative
research approach. Qualitative research aims to investigate and understand social and
⋆ Work partly supported by the projects EU-FP7-IP-SecureChange, EU-FP7-NoE-NESSOS.