Um metamodelo para alinhamento de padrões de requisitos e padrões de testes e um framework para avaliação de metamodelos

Abstract

A Software Requirement Pattern (SRP) is a feasible reuse approach that joins recurrent and high-quality software requirements from a set of applications. SRP is a widely investigated theme because it improves the quality of requirements specifications and reduces delivery time and project cost. Despite its importance for Requirements Engineering (RE), there is a lack of research on SRP over other software life cycle phases. Considering the intrinsic relation between RE and testing, this work aims to elaborate on an abstract and domain-independent reuse strategy for aligning SRP and Software Test Pattern (STP). A metamodel called Software Pattern MetaModel (SoPaMM) was produced so that requirements, behaviors, and test cases are related, with the influence of existing agile practices as Behavior-Driven Development (BDD). A Terminal Model Editor (TMEd) tool was also developed to produce pattern catalogues following the SoPaMM metamodel grammar. Moreover, the Metamodel Quality Requirements and Evaluation (MQuaRE) framework was defined to evaluate the SoPaMM metamodel quality. Then, SoPaMM was evaluated from the perspective of the quality properties defined in MQuaRE, and the evaluation results indicated that the metamodel has good quality concerning Compliance, Conceptual Suitability, Usability, Maintenance, and Portability characteristics. The main contributions of this research are: (i) a research agenda on the state of the art and state of the practice of SRP; (ii) the identification of a lack of research involving SRP in other phases of the software life cycle, beyond RE; (iii) the SoPaMM metamodel; (iv) the TMEd tool; (v) the MQuaRE framework; and (vi) the quality evaluation of the SoPaMM metamodel using the MQuaRE framework. Lessons learned and proposals of future work conclude this research.