Context: Managing Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) in software projects is challenging, and projects that adopt Model-Driven Development (MDD) are no exception. Although several methods and techniques have been proposed to face this challenge, there is still little evidence on how NFRs are handled in MDD by practitioners. Knowing more about the state of the practice may help researchers to steer their research and practitioners to improve their daily work. Objective: In this paper, we present our findings from an interview-based survey conducted with practitioners working in 18 different companies from 6 European countries. From a practitioner's point of view, the paper shows what barriers and benefits the management of NFRs as part of the MDD process can bring to companies, how NFRs are supported by MDD approaches, and which strategies are followed when (some) types of NFRs are not supported by MDD approaches. Results: Our study shows that practitioners perceive MDD adoption as a complex process with little to no tool support for NFRs, reporting productivity and maintainability as the types of NFRs expected to be supported when MDD is adopted. But in general, companies adapt MDD to deal with NFRs. When NFRs are not supported, the generated code is sometimes changed manually, thus compromising the maintainability of the software developed. However, the interviewed practitioners claim that the benefits of using MDD outweight the extra effort required by these manual adaptations. Conclusion: Overall, the results indicate that it is important for practitioners to handle `NFRs in MDD, but further research is necessary in order to lower the barrier for supporting a broad spectrum of NFRs with MDD. Still, much conceptual and tool implementation work seems to be necessary to lower the barrier of integrating the broad spectrum of NFRs in practice.

The number of papers and articles on goals would suggest that goal-oriented requirements engineering is a well understood and mature area within the requirements engineering discipline. In particular, there is a wealth of published material on formal goal modelling approaches. However, the uptake of the goal approaches advocated by academics and researchers within real world settings appears to be quite low. Where goals are used in industrial practice their use is mainly informal and the methods used are inconsistent. There appears to be a significant gap between research and practice in the use of goals within requirements engineering. A two-part study was undertaken to check whether there is evidence to support this view of a disconnection between research and industry. Firstly, a literature survey of requirements engineering papers about goals reveals a large body of published material, but the majority has little industrial involvement. Secondly, a questionnaire completed by experienced requirements engineering practitioners suggests that use of goals in practice is inconsistent, informal, and rarely utilises formal modelling approaches. This paper proposes future work that would close the gap between research and practice in the use of goals within requirements engineering.

Machine and plant automation (M&PA) is becoming more and more complex, especially, as additional functionality is realized by a rising amount of software. In order to meet high requirements regarding the quality of these machines and plants, sophisticated methods for quality assurance (QA) are needed. Interaction diagrams have been established throughout different domains for specifying use cases, requirements and test cases and therefore are an essential part of quality assurance. In this paper two approaches aiming at supporting QA in machine and plant automation, namely Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) in Model-based Integrated Requirements Analysis (MIRA) and Unified Modeling Language Sequence Diagrams (UML SDs) for Programmable Logic Controller testing (UMLSD4PLC), are compared and analyzed regarding their benefit to QA.

Automated production systems involve multiple engineering disciplines and often operate for several decades. Therefore, in order to leverage benefits of model-based system engineering, modeling approaches must handle both multiple disciplines and variability. As a first step towards variability modeling and management, a small case study is carried out to investigate the opportunities and challenges when enhancing an interdisciplinary modeling approach with delta modeling - a technique for specifying variants and versions. The paper reflects critically its applicability, implications as well as potential beneficial impacts and discusses encouraging challenges and next steps towards an interdisciplinary approach for variability modeling and management.

Model-Driven Development (MDD) is no longer a novel development paradigm. It has become mature from a research perspective and recent studies show its adoption in industry. Still, some issues remain a challenge. Among them, we are interested in the treatment of non-functional requirements (NFRs) in MDD processes. Very few MDD approaches have been reported to deal with NFRs (and they do it in a limited way). However, it is clear that NFRs need to be considered somehow in the final product of the MDD process. To better understand how NFRs are integrated into the existing MDD approaches, we have initiated the NFR4MDD project, a multi-national empirical study, based on interviews with companies working on MDD projects. Our project aims at surveying the state of the practice for this topic. In this paper, we summarize our research protocol and present the current status of our study. The discussion will focus on the peculiarities of our study's context and organization involving about 20 researchers from 8 European countries.

A system’s requirements and its architecture are usually developed at least partly in parallel. This demands a continuous and automated assessment to confirm that the architecture conforms to its requirements. To enable such an assessment, the stepwise formalization of informal requirements has been proposed. However, there is no canonical set of artifacts and analysis techniques that has been evaluated for this task in practice yet. In this paper we propose an artifact model and a process that enables the continuous conformance assessment between requirements and architecture in a model-based context. We evaluate both in a development project with a group of students.

Model-based requirements engineering supports eliciting, specifying and analyzing the work products elaborated during the requirements engineering process by providing adequate models. However, especially the inclusion of formal models needs to be investigated further. These models represent requirements and have to be integrated with reference models that define and structure the work results and their relations. We have developed the research tool MIRA to provide an infrastructure for the tool-based evaluation of the usage of models in the field of requirements engineering. In this paper we present the research questions addressed by MIRA concerning the reference model and the formal models. We explain how MIRA supports answering these research questions.

Identifying strengths and weaknesses in requirements engineering (RE) activities and deriving corresponding improvement and rectification recommendations are the main goals of the presented content-based RE assessment approach, which relies on a well-founded RE reference model. Two representative examples from our case study pool, carried out for companies with established RE practices in different domains, demonstrate the approach, its results and benefits.