View Partner Search: PS-ES-869
PROPOSAL AT A GLANCE
Proposal name:
Subject:
This project proposes to define an automatic requirement extraction and modelling process to develop a prototype platform and to integrate it into a commercial or any other heterogeneous environment. Despite the software current importance, domain specific constraints accomplishment are seldom verified in software developments as formal requirements.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Proposal Outline:
Looking back to the early days of computing, our clients expected our systems just to work - where work means producing functionally correct, crash-free results. Today our clients demand much more than running hardware and functional correctness. We are increasingly expected to produce systems with functional completeness. This completeness includes consideration of the 'ilities' - from accessibility to usability - to help us realize full design opportunity. In short, we must understand and define, more completely than ever before the business, the operating, clients, social and cultural environments of our yet-to-be systems. We have many fine requirement processes for specifying forms.
A recent European survey showed that the principal problem areas in software development and production are the requirement specifications and the management of customer requirements. There is no doubt that this is equally true in other parts of the world. Improving the processes of discovering, documenting and managing system requirements is critical for future business success.
As software development is now part of the global economy, requirements engineering is the key bridge between customers and suppliers. Understanding and translating users' needs into effective solutions has always been vital. However, as development is outsourced, requirements have to reflect cultures, languages and local needs. Furthermore, requirements understanding becomes a collaborative activity across time and space.
The last decade has seen significant changes in the way high-quality software is developed. One important trend has been the wide adoption of practices that guide designers in the reuse not only of code but also larger conceptual structures.
Domain constraints are still interpreted and manually introduced, normally as use cases. These use cases must be coded, and manually verified because unit test or mock techniques are not enough or even just not appropriated at all. Software life cycles become tedious and error prone. Thus leads to a not so high-quality software or at least not so client satisfaction.
Keywords:
Requisite Engineering,
Code Generative,
Semantic techniques,
Inference, rules, and model validation,
Domain Specific Modelling,
Software Development Management,
Object Constraint Language.
PARTNER PROFILE SOUGHT
Required skills and Expertise:
Experts in natural language processing, extraction and data mining.
Experts in semantics, creation and management of ontologies.
Experts in meta-languages and modelling techniques (MDA, UML, DSL,GME).
Experts in domain analysis, and model-driven engineering.
Experts in code generation.
Tool providers able to design, develop, and build all the tools and architecture proposed.
Industries and organizations that could act as end users
Description of work to be carried out by the partner(s) sought:
1. To develop or adapt a suitable multi language technique for natural language text mining.
2. Based on a real case study, to develop or adapt an ontology specific to this concrete domain.
3. To develop a meta-model specification and architecture for requirement support.
4. To develop tools and automatic processes for transformation from non formal constraints to formal model requirements.
5. To develop an convenient architecture capable of managing formal requirements
6. To develop a procedure to automatically test and verify the formal requirements accomplishment.
7. To develop a code generative system able to produce code and tests adapted to different languages and environments
8. To provide a preliminary validation of the proposed solution, for example, a proof-of-concept and/or sound arguments that the technique solution will work and that it will scale to real-world-sized problems.
Type of partner(s) sought:
Research centre / company:
Research institutions in meta-modelling, requirements engineering.
Tool providers to implement the solution and enable its usage.
End user :
Organisation or Enterprise that could provide a suitable environment (i.e. business, financial, medical or industrial process driven by contract ) which are interested in software constraint verification and accomplishment.

