Jakob Mund

D. Méndez Fernández, W. Böhm, A. Vogelsang et al.

Artefacts play a vital role in software and systems development processes. Other terms like documents, deliverables, or work products are widely used in software development communities instead of the term artefact. In the following, we use the term `artefact' including all these other terms. Despite its relevance, the exact denotation of the term `artefact' is still not clear due to a variety of different understandings of the term and to a careless negligent usage. This often leads to approaches being grounded in a fuzzy, unclear understanding of the essential concepts involved. In fact, there does not exist a common terminology. Therefore, it is our goal that the term artefact be standardised so that researchers and practitioners have a common understanding for discussions and contributions. In this position paper, we provide a positioning and critical reflection upon the notion of artefact in software engineering at different levels of perception and how these relate to each other. We further contribute a meta model that provides a description of an artefact that is independent from any underlying process model. This meta model defines artefacts at three levels. Abstraction and refinement relations between these levels allow correlating artefacts to each other and defining the notion of related, refined, and equivalent artefacts. Our contribution shall foster the long overdue and too often underestimated terminological discussion on what artefacts are to provide a common ground with clearer concepts and principles for future software engineering contributions, such as the design of artefact-oriented development processes and tools.

Jakob Mund, Henning Femmer, Daniel Méndez Fernández et al.

Background: Requirements Engineering is crucial for project success, and to this end, many measures for quality assurance of the software requirements specification (SRS) have been proposed. Goal: However, we still need an empirical understanding on the extent to which SRS are created and used in practice, as well as the degree to which the quality of an SRS matters to subsequent development activities. Method: We studied the relevance of SRS by relying on survey research and explored the impact of quality defects in SRS by relying on a controlled experiment. Results: Our results suggest that the relevance of SRS quality depends both on particular project characteristics and what is considered as a quality defect; for instance, the domain of safety critical systems seems to motivate for an intense usage of SRS as a means for communication whereas defects hampering the pragmatic quality do not seem to be as relevant as initially thought. Conclusion: Efficient and effective quality assurance measures must be specific for carefully characterized contexts and carefully select defect classes.