Publications

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2014
Barišić, A., V. Amaral, M. Goulão, and A. Aguiar, "Introducing usability concerns early in the DSL development cycle: FlowSL experience report", Model-Driven Development Processes and Practices Workshop Proceedings, MD2P2 2014, Valencia, Spain, September, 2014. Abstractflowslmodelsdraft.pdf

Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) developers aim to narrow the gap between the level of abstraction used by domain users and the one provided by the DSL, in order to help taming the increased complexity of computer systems and real-world problems. The quality in use of a DSL is essential for its successful adoption. We illustrate how a usability evaluation process can be weaved into the development process of a concrete DSL - FlowSL - used for specifying humanitarian campaign processes lead by an international Non-Governmental Organization. FlowSL is being developed following an agile process using Model-Driven Development (MDD) tools, to cope with vague and poorly understood requirements in the beginning of the development process.

2015
Gralha, C., J. Araújo, and M. Goulão, "Metrics for measuring complexity and completeness for social goal models", Information Systems, 2015. AbstractWebsite

Goal-oriented Requirements Engineering approaches have become popular in the Requirements Engineering community as they provide expressive modelling languages for requirements elicitation and analysis. However, as a common challenge, such approaches are still struggling when it comes to managing the accidental complexity of their models. Furthermore, those models might be incomplete, resulting in insufficient information for proper understanding and implementation. In this paper, we provide a set of metrics, which are formally specified and have tool support, to measure and analyse complexity and completeness of goal models, in particular social goal models (e.g. i⁎). Concerning complexity, the aim is to identify refactoring opportunities to improve the modularity of those models, and consequently reduce their accidental complexity. With respect to completeness, the goal is to automatically detect model incompleteness. We evaluate these metrics by applying them to a set of well-known system models from industry and academia. Our results suggest refactoring opportunities in the evaluated models, and provide a timely feedback mechanism for requirements engineers on how close they are to completing their models.

Ameller, D., X. Franch, C. Gómez, J. Araújo, R. B. Svensson, S. Biffl, J. Cabot, V. Cortellessa, M. Daneva, D. M. Fernández, A. Moreira, H. Muccini, A. Vallecillo, M. Wimmer, V. Amaral, H. Brunelière, L. Burgueño, M. Goulão, B. Schätz, and S. Teufl, "Handling Non-Functional Requirements in Model-Driven Development: An Ongoing Industrial Survey", 23rd International Conference on Requirements Engineering (RE'15) - RE: Next!, Ottawa, Canada, IEEE Computer Society, 24-28 August, 2015.
Störrle, H., M. R. V. Chaudron, V. Amaral, and M. Goulão, "First International Workshop on Human Factors in Modeling (HuFaMo 2015) @ MODELS 2015 - Preface", First International Workshop on Human Factors in Modeling (HuFaMo 2015) @ MODELS 2015, Ottawa, Canada, 28 Sep., 2015.
2016
Goulão, M., V. Amaral, and M. Mernik, "Quality in model-driven engineering: a tertiary study", Software Quality Journal, vol. 24, issue 3, pp. 601-633, 2016. Abstract

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11219-016-9324-8

Website

Model-driven engineering (MDE) is believed to have a significant impact in software quality. However, researchers and practitioners may have a hard time locating consolidated evidence on this impact, as the available information is scattered in several different publications. Our goal is to aggregate consolidated findings on quality in MDE, facilitating the work of researchers and practitioners in learning about the coverage and main findings of existing work as well as identifying relatively unexplored niches of research that need further attention. We performed a tertiary study on quality in MDE, in order to gain a better understanding of its most prominent findings and existing challenges, as reported in the literature. We identified 22 systematic literature reviews and mapping studies and the most relevant quality attributes addressed by each of those studies, in the context of MDE. Maintainability is clearly the most often studied and reported quality attribute impacted by MDE. Eighty out of 83 research questions in the selected secondary studies have a structure that is more often associated with mapping existing research than with answering more concrete research questions (e.g., comparing two alternative MDE approaches with respect to their impact on a specific quality attribute). We briefly outline the main contributions of each of the selected literature reviews. In the collected studies, we observed a broad coverage of software product quality, although frequently accompanied by notes on how much more empirical research is needed to further validate existing claims. Relatively, little attention seems to be devoted to the impact of MDE on the quality in use of products developed using MDE.

Santos, M., C. Gralha, M. Goulão, J. Araújo, A. Moreira, and J. Cambeiro, "What is the Impact of Bad Layout in the Understandability of Social Goal Models?", 24th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering, Beijing, China, IEEE, 12-16, Sep., 2016. Abstractre_2016_eyetracker_istar.pdf

The i* community has published guidelines, including model layout guidelines, for the construction of models. Our goal is to evaluate the effect of the layout guidelines on the i* novice stakeholders’ ability to understand and review i* models. We conducted a quasi-experiment where participants were given two understanding and two reviewing tasks. Both tasks involved a model with a bad layout and another model following the i* layout guidelines. We evaluated the impact of layouts by combining the success level in those tasks and the required effort to accomplish them. Effort was assessed using time, perceived complexity (with NASA TLX), and eye-tracking data. Participants were more successful in understanding than in reviewing tasks. However, we found no statistically significant difference in the success, time taken, or perceived complexity, between tasks conducted with models with a bad layout and models with a good layout. Most participants had little to no prior knowledge in i*, making them more representative of stakeholders with no requirements engineering expertise. They were able to understand the models fairly well after a short tutorial, but struggled when reviewing models. Adherence to the existing i* layout guidelines did not significantly impact i* model understanding and reviewing performance.

Silva, L., A. Moreira, J. Araújo, C. Gralha, M. Goulão, and V. Amaral, "Exploring Views for Goal-Oriented Requirements Models", 35th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER2016, Gifu, Japan, 14-17 Nov., 2016. Abstract

http://er2016.cs.titech.ac.jp/

silva2016er.pdf

Requirements documents and models need to be used by many stakeholders with di erent technological pro ciency, during software development. Each stakeholder may need to understand the entire (or simply part of the) requirements artifacts. To empower those stakeholders, views of the requirements should be con gurable to their particular needs. Information visualization techniques may help in this process. In this paper, we propose di erent views aimed at highlighting information that is relevant for a particular stakeholder, helping him to query requirements artifacts. We o er three kinds of visualization capturing language and domain elements, while providing a gradual model overview: the big picture view, the syntax-based view, and the concern-based view. We instantiate these views with i* models and introduce an implementation prototype in the iStarLab tool.

Bombonatti, D., C. Gralha, A. Moreira, J. Araújo, and M. Goulão, "Usability of Requirements Techniques: A Systematic Literature Review", The 31st ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing, Pisa, Italy, ACM/SIGAPP, 4-8 Apr., 2016. Abstract

The usability of requirements engineering (RE) techniques has been recognised as a key factor for their successful adoption by industry. RE techniques must be accessible to stakeholders with different backgrounds, so they can be empowered to effectively and efficiently contribute to building successful systems. When selecting an appropriate requirements engineering technique for a given context, one should consider the usability supported by each of the candidate techniques. The first step towards achieving this goal is to gather the best evidence available on the usability of RE approaches by performing a systematic literature review, to answer one research question: How is the usability of requirements engineering techniques and tools addressed? We systematically review articles published in the Requirements Engineering Journal, one of the main sources for mature work in RE, to motivate a research roadmap to make RE approaches more accessible to stakeholders with different backgrounds.