To strengthen the connection between requirements and design during the early stages of architectural design, a designer would like to have notations to help visualize the incremental refinement of an architecture from initially abstract descriptions to increasingly concrete components and interactions, all the while maintaining a clear focus on the relevant requirements at each step. We propos...

A new generation of distributed embedded systems (DES) is coming up in which several heterogeneous networked devices execute distributed applications. Such heterogeneity may apply to size, physical boundaries as well as functional and non-functional requirements. Typically, these systems are immersed in changing environments that produce dynamic requirements to which they must adapt. In this sc...

This document describes an ongoing commercial project that aims to model the cultural heritage domain in an ontology, containing data from eleven types of heritages, from bibliographic items, to industrial patrimony, or to prehistoric excavations for a Spanish region, Cantabria. Besides, the project will develop a series of applications that get the most out of the ontology, beginning by a sema...

Investigation has been undertaken into the use of software specification methods for instrument systems specification. In the first part of this paper, some of the well-known structured software specification methods are briefly evaluated against a set of criteria we established, in the context of measuring instrument systems. We then conduct a case study in the widely used CORE method. It has ...

The paper outlines an experiment conducted in two different academic environments, in which FIT tests were used as a functional requirements specification. Common challenges for functional requirements specifications are identified, and a comparison is made between how well prose and FIT user acceptance tests are suited to overcoming these challenges from the developer’s perspective. Experiment...

In this paper, I describe a simple functional programming language, GRL, in which most of the characteristic features of the popular behavior-based robot architectures can be concisely written as reusable software abstractions. This makes it easier to write clear, modular code, to “mix and match” arbitration mechanisms, and to experiment with variations on existing mechanisms. I describe the co...

There is growing interest in the notion of software development through the planned integration of COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) products. The potential advantages of this integrationcentric approach are shorter development time and reduced cost. Often a COTS based development process consists of an evaluation, selection, adaptation, integration, and evolution of components obtained from exte...

* Partially Supported by CNPq Grant No. 147192/1999-4. On-leave from Universidade Estadual do Oeste do Paraná. Abstract Use Cases Diagrams in the Unified Language Modeling (UML) have been used for capturing system functional requirements. However, the system development occurs in a context where organizational processes are well established. Therefore, we need to capture organizational requirem...

Although Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) have been present in many software development methods, they have been faced as a second or even third class type of requirement, frequently hided inside notes and therefore frequently neglected or forgotten. Surprisingly, despite the fact that nonfunctional requirements (NFR) are among the most expensive and difficult to deal with [5] [12] [3][10], ev...

In Web system development, the non-functional requirements (NFRs) are typically considered only briefly during the requirements elicitation stage and not rigorously articulated by either Web developers or the client. This paper reports on an investigation into this issue involving interviews with Web developers who were engaged in commercial Web development projects. The results from this quali...