Date of Award

2010

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Program

Computer Science

Supervisor

Dr. Nazim H. Madhavji

Abstract

For systems engineering projects, the developing organization is often required to demonstrate compliance against myriad of engineering standards and government regulations in order to avoid non-compliance penalties. The standards and regulations, which cross-reference among themselves, are also being referenced by the project contract and requirements. Thus, they collectively form a highly complex interrelationship network where system requirements are a key entity to be dealt with in development projects. To ensure compliance, it is essential to perform requirements engineering (RE) tasks such as i) elicitation of requirements from the applicable standards and regulation; (ii) determine requirements-related traces across related artifacts; (iii) manage changes in laws and requirements which may not have been reflected in the documents; (iv) verification of compliance, etc. To better understand the nature of the RE compliance project and the complexity involved in its environment, we conducted a case study on a large RE compliance project in industry. We qualitatively analyzed the artifacts used and created in the project and determined their requirement- oriented inter-relationships. Based on this analysis, we developed a meta-model for compliance that shows the various kinds of relationship existing among the artifacts This meta-model is novel and is a critical first step towards building grounded theory in the domain of compliance and is anticipated to aid in developing RE methods and tools.

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