Requirements Evolution and Reuse Using the Systems Engineering Process Activities (SEPA)

Abstract

As more organizations attempt to reuse previous development efforts and incorporate legacy systems, typical software development activities have transitioned from unique ground-up coding efforts to the integration of new code, legacy code, and COTS implementations. This transition has brought on a whole new set of development issues, including resolving mismatches between integrated components and tracing legacy and COTS components to requirements. This paper presents the Systems Engineering Process Activities (SEPA) methodology, developed to address these and other issues in current software development practices. SEPA aids the reuse and integration process by focusing on requirements integration and evolution, while maintaining traceability to requirements gathered from domain experts and end users. The SEPA methodology supports the development process by promoting requirements analysis prior to design, separation of domain-based and application-based (i.e. implementation-specific) requirements, and evaluating system component suitability in terms of domain and application requirements. The paper also presents an example illustrating the application of SEPA in the emergency incident response domain to facilitate requirements management and foster requirements reuse.