NEXOF-RA Open Requirements Process

Overview

Globally, the question is not whether the delivery of software is shifting towards a service-oriented model, but rather how and when can this evolution be achieved. Leading industry and academic institutions have joined forces to provide a practical answer to this question, forming NESSI, the European initiative for software and services, which now counts 300 member organizations of all sizes, from SME to multinationals, including academics, technology providers and users.

To drive this evolution NESSI has defined NEXOF a coherent and consistent open service framework designed to guarantee quality of service, ubiquitous operation and continuous availability. NESSI has also identified the strategy and plan to build this framework, starting with its reference architecture (RA). The NEXOF-RA project implements the initial phase of this plan.

The strategy is based on open contribution mechanisms which will ensure that NEXOF meets the requirements of the user community, incorporates the best open technologies, and triggers research with concrete, applicable results. Ultimately, this process is essential in gaining wide acceptance and building a very dynamic community.

Contributors to this project will join forces in an active community, fostering partnerships with significant industrial and academic participants. The framework will be promoted and used in significant industrial deployments; this will give visibility and impact to your contributions. All contributors will gain expertise on NEXOF, which will be a key asset once the framework is deployed. Significant contributors will be recognized as co-authors.

The mission of NEXOF-RA is to address comprehensive service-oriented software system architectures and specifications. To ensure the success of the project, a close orientation to the needs of the market is needed. As an initial step, potential NEXOF stakeholders and those putting forward the specific cases where contacted to determine what they feel to be important and what might be the priorities (i.e. must, should, may have). The result of this activity is a list of scenarios from the different stakeholders. Those scenarios include different standpoints, interpretations, opinions, and needs. The scenarios and requirements are those considered important by the NEXOF-RA partners, who are involved in different domains, and that invest in the project. From this scenarios a set of high level requirements have been derived.

NEXOF-RA stakeholders

The NEXOF-RA stakeholders we want to address in this call for contributions are:

• Technology Providers (e.g., SMEs and large companies)
• Users (e.g., SMEs, large companies, research community)
• Public Administrations

The reason is that we assume that each of those groups has characteristic needs and requirements. For example, SMEs usually have a limited amount of budget for investing as well as a very limited number of resources.

Call for contributions

To achieve a higher alignment of NEXOF with the actual needs of the market, an Open Requirements Process to collect additional scenarios and requirements is carried out on a 6-months basis. We seek contribution on the following topics:

• Scenarios that should be supported within the NEXOF reference architecture, and
• Requirements that should be implementable using the NEXOF reference architecture.

The templates given below are used to collect scenarios and requirements. Contributions will allow us to collect and to consolidate new requirements from different stakeholders and to identify gaps in the architecture based on the new needs.

The submitted proposals will be evaluated considering the completeness and motivation of the submitted requirement, the client references, and the potential impact on the existing architecture.

The copyright for your contributions must allow the publication of the NEXOF Reference Architecture as an open document with derivative rights (the project is currently using the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License). We encourage you to check eligibility as part of one of your funded activities since NEXOF-RA will not be able fund your participation to the project.

Questionnaire for submitting a scenario

Within NEXOF-RA we define scenarios as "facts describing an existing system and its environment including the behaviours of agents and sufficient context information to allow discovery and validation of system requirements".
To describe a scenario the following questionnaire is used:

• Short name: a short name for the scenario Detailed, step-by-step
• scenario description: a textual description of the scenario. Additionally, the domain, the sub domain or the main objective as well as contextual information about the system environment should be specified. It is strongly suggested to add UML diagrams such as a use case diagram or a sequence diagram to clarify textual descriptions.
• Rationale: describes the reasoning and justification for the scenario - that is some important background for why the scenario is what it is. This will be important to help those of us less familiar with the domains to work with the scenarios.
• Service consumer: for each user and location (the location indicates where the consumer stays, e.g., customer-home; customer-office; technician-office, etc) the following has to be specified:
  • Primary requests, problems to solve or needs
  • Required performances or needs
  • How and when the user prefers to obtain the service etc. (subscription, pay for use.) and if it is useful or necessary
• Service provider: a possible description of who provides the requested service.
• Service integrator/developer: a possible description of who integrates or develops the requested service.
• Problems and challenges: the specific problems that each scenario addresses or that consumers and providers face.
• Architecture and constraints: all involved devices (PC, PDA, etc.), hardware, software, and possible integration with existing applications, how communication is accomplished (GPS, GPRS, Bluetooth, infrared, etc.)
• Source: describe how this scenario was produced, from whom it was elicited and possibly it's role within the organization.
• Motivation: describe why this scenario has been selected.

Questionnaire to submit a requirement

If you want to submit directly a requirement, please use the questionnaire below:

• Short name: a short name for this requirement
• Requirement type: on of the following
• Functional requirement: what the product has to do or what processing actions it is to take
• Quality attributes: properties that the functions must have, such as performance and usability
• Project constraints: restrictions due to the budget or the available time
• Design constraints: restrictions on how the reference architecture must be designed
• External constraints: restrictions because of business or law restrictions
• Related to: the scenario ID to which this requirement is related
• Description: the intention of the requirement
• Rationale: a justification of the requirement
• Domain: the domain and sub-domain of this requirement.
• Target:
• Domain-independent requirement
• Cross-domain requirement
• Domain-specific requirement
• Originator type
• Service consumer
• Service provider
• Service integrator/developer
• Fit criterion: a measurement of the requirement such that it is possible to test if the solution matches the original requirement.
• Comments: additional comments if needed
• Conflicts: requirements that cannot be implemented if this on is
• Supporting materials: a pointer to documents that illustrate and explain this requirement
• Priority of accomplishment within the NEXOF-RA project:
• Must have
• Should have
• May have

Submissions

Submissions can be sent via e-mail to Alberto Silliti (asillitti@unibz.it )