Summary Designing safety‐critical software in domains ensuring essential services like transportation, energy, or health requires high assurance techniques and compliance with domain specific standards. As a result of the global interconnectivity and the evolution toward cyber‐physical systems, the increasing exposure to cyber threats calls for the adoption of cyber security standards and frameworks. Although safety and security have different cultures, both fields share similar concepts and tools and are worth being investigated together. This paper provides the background to understand emerging co‐engineering approaches. It advocates for the use of a model‐based approach to provide a sound risk‐oriented process and to capture rationales interconnecting top‐level standards/directives to concrete safety/security measures. We show the benefits of adopting goal‐oriented analysis that can be transposed later to domain‐specific frameworks. Both qualitative and quantitative reasoning aspects are analyzed and discussed, especially to support trade‐off analysis. Our work is driven by a representative case study in drinking water utility in the scope of the NIS regulation for operator of essential services.

The Business Process Management lifecycle involves identifying, analysing and evolving the design of an organisation’s tasks. Modelling plays a key role in those activities to capture the processes but also the related goals representing the rationale behind them. While some mappings have been defined between such models, they lack guidelines to support analysis or (re)design activities in order to improve processes in an evolving organisation. The purpose of this paper is to propose a two-staged guidance: (1) a lightweight approach leaving the goal model implicit but using goal reasoning techniques; and (2) an heavier approach where an explicit goal model is explicitly built and mapped to support the redesign process. Our work is experimented on a running case study inspired from a logistics system. Although still in progress, we were able to uncover interesting problems and to suggest relevant redesigns.

Managing project risks is challenging for many enterprises, especially smaller ones, because they generally only have very limited method or tool support, i.e. basic, qualitative and rather short term reaction to the occurrence of risks. This results in higher vulnerability and reduced competitiveness. This paper proposes a risk management framework fitting SMEs needs by providing a way to adequately quantify risks and address them at two levels. First, an Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used to perform cost-benefit analyses of the possible mitigation actions assessed through Monte-Carlo simulations. Second, an on-line optimisation tool is used to make sure the planning is following the minimal risk path and reschedule mitigation action as soon as a risk has materialised. To address the limited SMEs resources, the core components are provided as Open Source with a clean application programming interface for easing integration with existing tools. A reference integration with the Open Source Redmine project management tool is also provided.

Systematising requirements reuse is a key step to raise the efficiency and maturity level in Requirements Engineering (RE), which is even better when centred on a repository of common artefacts like templates and patterns that allow people to build and share a strong reference framework. The aim of this tool demo is to show how to deploy an approach combining a local library for each analyst and a more controlled shared library. We show how to implement a library on a model-based RE tool and illustrate key scenarios related to the identification, publication, search and instantiation of requirements templates and patterns.

Cloud application deployment is becoming increasingly popular for the removal of upfront hardware costs, the pay-per-use cost model and their ability to scale. However, deploying software on the Cloud carries both opportunities and threats regarding energy efficiency. In order to help Cloud application developers learn and reason about the energy consumption of their application on the server-side, we have developed a framework centred on a UML profile for relating energy goals, requirements and associated KPI metrics to application design and deployment elements. Our previous work has focused on the use of such a framework to carry out our run-time experiments in order to select the best approach. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of a complementary approach for providing support at design time based on finer grained deployment models, the specification of Cloud and energy adaptation policies and the use of a discrete event simulator for reasoning on key performance indicators such as energy but also overall performance, delay and costs. The goal is to support the Cloud developer in pre-selecting the best trade-off that can be further tuned at run-time.

Blended learning, mixing both online and face-to-face learning, is now a well established trend in higher education and also increasingly used in companies and public sector. While preserving direct contact with the teacher/trainer, it also provides additional electronic channels to easily share training material and to support interactions among all actors. This paper focuses on specificities of adult training such as their goal orientation, the higher level of practicality and the higher level of collaboration. We also deal with the explicit goal of building communities where learners are progressively sharing their growing experience. Our work is driven by a real-world case study. We report about how generic e-learning tools available on the market can be adapted to address the needs of such a use case and also present some lessons learnt.

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Requirements Engineering (RE) tools and more generally the whole Software Engineering toolchain follow the strong trend towards web-based interface. This allows the analyst to use their tools in a "Software as a Service" mode either from a local company server or directly in the Cloud. Such deployments also ease toolchain integration by connecting their respective API through secured web-services, possibly using specific software lifecycle interoperability standards. In this tool demonstration, we illustrate the results of the rewrite process of a major Requirements Engineering tool towards this purpose. Our tooling has the following key features: (i) it supports rich requirements models based on goal-oriented RE, (ii) it is implemented as a collaborative concept server based on Eclipse Modelling technology and (iii) it exposes a REST interface supporting model building, diagram edition, history retrieval, snapshot management, collaborative mode, user authentication and project management. The following scenarios will be demonstrated (1) collaborative edition of a shared RE model, (2) rich service composition with application lifecycle management tools and (3) easy web-component integration in third-party web interfaces.

Requirements Engineering is a key step in any project aiming at evolving an information system. The temporal dimension of requirements is already supported by specific formalisms which enable the verification of the temporal behaviour of the system under construction. In contrast, space requirements have for long been reserved to Geographic Information Systems. Nowadays, systems are becoming ubiquitous due to generalisation of mobile technologies and the emergence of the Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems. This increasing level of connection of the software with the real-world requires more systematic methods for capturing and reasoning about the system not only from the temporal but also from the spatial point of views. Here, we present our ongoing effort for systematically identifying, structuring and reasoning about spatial and temporal requirements. Our work lies at the cross-roads of goal-oriented requirements engineering and geomatics. We discuss our current progress on the design of a coherent set of notations borrowed from both fields to enrich domain and goal models with spatial and temporal properties. We also sketch how specific methodologicalsupport can be provided on top of them to achieve high quality requirements.

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Abstract Small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) involved in software development often experience problems in mastering their development processes. This can lead to time and cost overruns or failure to address functional and nonfunctional requirements. In general, this can significantly affect customer satisfaction and hamper business growth potential. This paper reports on a survey conducted in Belgium to assess more precisely which and how SMEs are affected by problems related to development processes. The survey was driven by the ISO29110 lightweight standard focusing on very small entities developing software, ie, whose internal IT department is less than 25 people. Worldwide, and in particular in Belgium, this represents a very large portion of SMEs in business. Survey results highlight the most frequent issues and how they may be linked to organization and project characteristics. The survey is based on a free online self‐assessment tool. Therefore, results go 1 step further than identifying issues encountered in companies: the tool also infers a set of quick‐win high‐level recommendations to solve these issues. Our results are also compared with those reported by other surveys targeting both large and small companies.

Goal-Orientation provides a rich framework for reasoning about systems during the Requirements Engineering (RE) phase. While critical properties like safety or security can require formal semantics, performing quantitative reasoning on semi-formal models in a much more lightweight approach reveals to be sufficient in many projects. Most of the time, existing RE tools only target specific quantification scenarios or do not provide easy mechanisms for implementing them. In order to demonstrate the ability to provide mechanisms that are both generic and powerful, we developed an extension of the Objectiver tool in three directions: (1) internal reasoning capabilities on AND-OR goal/obstacles structures, (2) close integration with an external spreadsheet application and (3) model export for building assessment tools using model-driven engineering techniques. We also demonstrate how our approach can cope with a variety of industrial scenarios requiring some form of quantification such as risk analysis, selection of design alternatives, effort estimation, and assessment of customer satisfaction.

This paper defines a model of a special type of digital forensics tools, known as digital media preparation forensic tools, using the formal refinement language Event-B. The complexity and criticality of many types of computer and Cyber crime nowadays combined with improper or incorrect use of digital forensic tools calls for the evidence produced by such tools to be able to meet the minimum admissibility standards the legal system requires, in general implying that it must be generated from reliable and robust tools. Despite the fact that some research and effort has been spent on the validation of digital media preparation forensic tools by means of testing (e.g. within NIST), the verification of such tools and the formal specification of their expected behaviour remains largely under-researched. The goal of this work is to provide a formal specification against which the implementations of such tools can be analysed and tested in the future.

Designing accessible web sites and more generally Internet-connected devices remains a challenging task nowadays. A number of guidelines (such as the WCAG2) are now widely available and recognised. To better cope with the quickly evolving technological landscape, these guidelines are also being formulated in technology-neutral terms. However this is still leaving the user dimension largely implicit, which makes it difficult to understand exactly which kind of user a given website is hindering. This paper describes how to capture and use rational links between guidelines and user capabilities/impairments by combining a set of complementary models (user, task, user interface, guidelines). The process of building those accessibility rationales relies upon available user and guidelines ontologies and also on obstacle identification and resolution techniques borrowed from the requirements engineering domain. This resulting enriched guidance enables a number of interesting new scenarios to better help web developers, analyse guidelines or make comparisons between guidelines.

While testing is heavily used and largely automated in software development projects, the reuse of test practices across similar projects in a given domain is seldom systematized and supported by adequate methods and tools. This paper presents a practical approach that emerged from a concrete industrial case in the smart card domain at STMicroelectronics Belgium in order to better address this kind of challenge. The central concept is a test knowledge repository organized as a collection of specific patterns named QPatterns. A systematic process was followed, first to gather, structure and abstract the test practices, then to produce and validate an initial repository, and finally to make it evolve later on Testers can then rely on this repository to produce high quality test plans identifying all the functional and nonfunctional aspects that have to be addressed, as well as the concrete tests that have to be developed within the context of a new project. A tool support was also developed and integrated in a traceable way into the existing industrial test environment. The approach was validated and is currently under deployment at STMicroelectronics Belgium.

Software architectural design is a key activity in the software development process. It is especially critical for embedded systems subject to specific non-functional requirements such as performance or reliability. However, the activity of designing an architecture fulfilling a set of requirements still remains largely informal, based on experience with the support of some informal patterns and styles.The purpose of this paper is to explore how to build more systematically architectures for embedded systems using precise models both for the requirements and the architecture. A mapping is proposed between those models together with guidelines on how to inject functional and non-functional requirements at various stages. The process is illustrated and discussed using a cruise control system.

Developing high quality requirements specifications is a necessity for a number of critical industrial systems. An integrated toolset, called FAUST, is proposed to assist in the production of such specifications based on the KAOS goal-driven methodology. The tool suite is designed to naturally extend the existing semiformal modeling framework and to allow formalizing only the relevant critical parts. Two tools from the toolset are presented. The requirements checker performs KAOS goal-level checks using existing model checking technology. The requirements animator produces domain-level animations hiding formality even further.