Requirements Analysis and System Specification

The requirement analysis and systems specification is presented in this report with focus on identification of requirement, proposing IT technology and verification and validation of requirements (Chitchyan et al. 2015). The report is analyzed through perspective of a given case study of a specific application domain. The case study is on cultural heritage institutions that are presently involved in digitizing their collection of items. The major concern for cultural heritage institutions is that the digitization requires permission from legal and authorized people, rightsholders (Fromer, J.C., 2015). The searching of rightsholders is a major task for the institutions and the searching process is called diligent search (Bahill and Madni 2017). The purpose of this report is to analyze the requirements for the case study and system specification to match the analysis.

The structure of the report is divided into three tasks. The three tasks are requirements identification and modelling, information technology solution for the given case study and SysML requirements verification and validation. The first task is volere template, use case diagrams and SysML requirements diagram for the requirements. The second task is solution for information technology and SysML block diagram with explanation. The third task is differences between verification and validation, available methods and tools for SysML V&V and SysML V&V methods incorporation in modeling methods.

Volere template

1. Purpose of the project
   • Goals of the project

The goal of this project is to propose and design an Information Technology solution for diligent search management of cultural heritage institutions.

1. Mandate constraints
   • Solution constraints

The only solution constraint is manual searching of databases in the developed platform for cultural heritage institutions.

• Implementation constraints

The implementation constraint is the platform developed which provides diligent search. It provides manual searching which is time consuming and high cost.

1. Scope of the Work
   • Context of the work

The project is regarding diligent search of legal and authorized rightsholders and the work is done through database system where searching is done manually.

• Work partitioning

The work is partitioned between searching of legal and authorized rightsholders for taking permission for digitization and non-legal rightsholders.

1. Scope of the Project
   • Project boundary

1. Functional and Data Requirements

     5.1. Functional requirements

Requirement Shell

Requirement Shell
Requirement #: 1F	Requirement Type:	Event/Use Case #:
Description: The system results in searching of rightsholders for the institution.
Rationale: To help institution choose appropriate rightshoder
Source: Cultural Heritage Institutions client’s
Fit Criterion: Only legal and authorized rightsholders are searched
Customer Satisfaction: 5	Customer Dissatisfaction: 2
Priority: 1 (1 highest)
Supporting Materials: Report from diligent search sources of UK.
Conflict: None

Figure 1: Use case diagram for the requirement analysis

(Source: Created by author)

 Figure 2: SysML Requirements diagram for the requirement analysis

(Source: Created by author)

Information Technology solution 

The federated database system is a type of database system that transparently organizes several database systems into a sole federated database management system. The federated database is also known as virtual database that is completely integrated and logical composite of all components in a federated database (Ji et al. 2015). The federated database system solves the problem of managing shared database at various locations. The federated database systems requirements are as follows. The first requirement is the accessibility of user to access various heterogeneous databases similar to accessing an individual database. The second requirement is accessibility of databases using a recognizable data model and systems (Beneventano, Olaru and Vincini 2017). The third requirement is that existing database system should not change any data as per the requirement of federated database system. The fourth requirement is the accommodation of new databases addition to the network system. The fifth requirement is accessibility of databases for both retrieving and updating of database. The sixth requirement is performance of federated database system should be equivalent to the performance of homogeneous distributed database systems (Baharorn, Deraman and Hamdan 2016). These shows that federated database systems has some requirements that is needed for achieving successful database management.

Federated Database Systems

The federated database system is characterized into components including autonomy, distribution and heterogeneity. The autonomy has features of transaction control, access control and query processing. The distribution has features of improved access to availability, reliability and time. The heterogeneity has features of making database function smoothly without any hassle.

The most popular organization in information technology field, IBM, has invested high cost in federation database management system. This has resulted in leading capabilities in the current market. The federation technology has provided huge benefits to the digital information world including storage of information in any format that is structured and unstructured. The federation database system technologies are available in the current market through various IBM products. The IBM products are InfoSphere Federation Server, InfoSphere Warehouse, TBM Enterprise Information portal (EIP) and Federation Server for UNIX, Windows and Linux (Analytics 2017). These products provide federation technologies to enhance and improve client’s investment for delivery of improved real business goals and values. The IBM’s federated database management systems provide powerful features for combining data from various data sources.

The other technology of federated database system provided by Oracle is Shared-Disk Cluster Database Architecture. This technology uses cluster format to deliver the required service. The cluster in Shared-Disk Cluster Database Architecture contains servers that are shared disk subsystem and interconnection of cluster (Das et al. 2015). The working process of Shared-Disk Cluster Database Architecture is the accessibility to all disks with equal participation of architecture of shared disk database on hardware cluster system. The Shared-Disk Cluster Database Architecture technology utilizes Cache Fusion. The working process of Cache Fusion is as follows. The utilization of collection of database caches in the database system satisfies the fusing of the caches into one cache (Amirishetty et al. 2017). The disk operation is removed from the critical path in Cache Fusion for the synchronization of data. The required number of messages is reduced for synchronization of inter-node. The exploitation of low-latency cluster with interconnects protocols for messages and data of database to ship between caches (Müller 2016). The Shared-Disk Cluster Database Architecture technologydoes not imposes any additional constraints on the developers. The Shared-Disk Cluster Database Architecture technology provides scalability to the client’s businesses. The Shared-Disk Cluster Database Architecture technology is available to client’s businesses as it provides recovery of failed node is automatic (Gupta and Kaushal 2017). The Shared-Disk Cluster Database Architecture technology is manageable as recovery of logs per instance is easy and simple.

Benefits of Federated Database Systems

The above paragraphs shows that federated database system discussed have various benefits and they are driving the current market with real business values. The advantages of federate database system are as follows. The benefits are consistency, uniform view of data, and easy access to data for clients and clients not aware of multiple existing databases that exist (Gupta and Kaushal 2017). However, there are disadvantages also related with the federated database system. They are complexity in creating automation of a global framework, sacrificing of associated autonomy and semantic information is loss based on performance of integrated schema. The other disadvantages are time consuming and prone to errors.

The various problems that need to be looked upon and researched in future are given in the following paragraph.

• Identification and representation of all the semantics that are useful in performance of federated database management system.
• Lack of integrated tools and software tools to improve performance, maintenance and management of federated database system.
• There is lack of sufficient transaction management algorithms to provide consistency levels.

Figure 3: SysML block diagram for the requirement analysis

(Source: Created by author)

The SysML block diagram given above represents the structure of the system for the given case study in a systematic hierarchical way (Grönninger et al. 2014). The diagram describes the requirements of Cultural Heritage Institutions through different nodes having different perceptions and functions. The diligent search management is the first node in this diagram which represents the primary requirement of the given case study. This node presents the requirements for digitization storage which is the main goal of the project. This node points to the requirements that together comprise the primary requirements (Nejati et al. 2016). These nodes are item storage, collection of items, copyright protection and diligent search. The item storage node represents storage of item information in the system. The collection of items node represents collection of items information. The copy right protection nodes the use of system for the digitization of item storage. The diligent search nodes represent the searching of the stored data in the system (Ali, Basit-Ur-Rahim and Arif 2015). The other two nodes represents the identification and authentication of rightsholders in the system respectively. Hence the nodes are interrelated with each other to provide a complete analysis of requirements for the given case study.

Verification and Validation

The verification and validation are two terms that are used commonly in software engineering. These two terms has different meaning in terms of analysis. The commonly interpreted definition of verification and validation are: is the correct system built and, is the system built correctly respectively. The differences of verification and validation are given as follows. Validation has concerns related to testing the system so that it will satisfy the customer’s requirements (Nejati et al. 2016). However, verification has concerns related to the development of system where the system is well-built, error free or not. The verification helps to determine only the quality of software used such as whether it is of high quality or not, however it does not ensure the usefulness of the system. The major difference between verification and validation is related with the specifications role of both the terms (Guo et al. 2015). This can be described as validation refers to checking whether the system specifications meet the customer’s requirements. Verification refers to testing of software whether it meets the requirement specification. The verification is an activity process where activities such as testing, design analysis, specification analysis and inspection are done. However, validation is a subjective process where subjective assessment of the system is done to know how perfectly it addressed the real-world analysis.

The differences show that both the terms are different from each other. However, nowadays, both the terms are used and they are needed throughout the project life cycle. Verification and Validation are now used in conjunction and referred to as software V&V toolbox that evaluates the systems and software (Guo et al. 2015). This model of software V&V is very helpful in doing the complete analysis of any project and system.

The verification and validation can be described as per the following example of requirement alignment with verification and validation. The verification and validation of requirements having weak alignment may lead to issues in the delivery of required products and services in correct time and with the appropriate quality (Bjarnason et al. 2014). There is lack of verifying of changed requirements that result due to weak interactions of requirements that changes. The result leads to quality problems in software, delays and efforts that are wasted. The alignment of requirements with verification and validation shows that there are challenges and practices related with it. The challenges related to alignment of requirements with verification and validation is intervention, accuracy and quality of the system requirements and size of the organization being developed.

The available methods and tools for SysML Verification and Validation requirements are given in the following paragraphs.

The B method is a subset of SysML Verification and Validation that provides early detection of critical issues in systems testing. The B method is a proven and great method that has been successful till date and used in various applications. The B method is a collective module which provides modeling of system (Rashid et al. 2016). The B methods modules are a part of the software system that consists of components for stack that can be abstract machines, implementations or refinements. The abstract machine is the physical and visible specification of B method modules. The refinement provides refinement of abstract machine or other refinements. The implementation provides refinement in the final step. The B method provides tool supported to the SysML verification and validation that provides better integration and decomposition. Therefore, B method for SysML verification and validation is a good method and it is useful for providing safety properties.

The other tool is Enterprise Architect for SysML verification and validation that is defined as a utilizing software tool for various projects (Conrad 2014). The tool for SysML verification and validation is processed as follows. The procedure includes description of verification plan for each verification requirement that are verification method, success criteria, verification owner and verification level. The Enterprise Architect tool helps to provide complete traceability from system requirement to improved scheduled costs and resources to ensure verification of system activities.

The day-to-day increase of communications between large amount of hardware and software subsystem results in complexity which is difficult to handle during verification and validation processes. Thus, SysML-based verification and validation framework provides combination for both continuous and discrete processes to verify and validate systems at every stage of system development. The SysML based verification and validation framework is defined as follows. There are three components of the framework and they are Block Definition Diagram (BDD), Internal Block Diagram (IBD) and state machine (Gauthier et al. 2015). The state machines describe the behavior and functionality of each system element. Hence, SysML model can be described as a model for simulation that comprises two different kind of blocks and they are component definition and flow ports type. However, there are issues in this framework and they are issues related to state reachability including pattern recognition, meta-heuristics and fuzzing. Therefore, these issues need to be considered for further researches.

Nowadays, there are increasing complexities related to system and this has resulted in increased difficulty in system design. The SysML verification and Validation proposes different types of techniques and methods to identify and evaluate desirable features of a system. The three major techniques are graphical modelling, formal and rigorous reasoning and support for modelling and its reasoning through automation. These techniques are useful to provide a clear understanding of the system requirements. These techniques are supported by tools that widely available in the market from vendors such as IBM, Sparx Systems and Atego (IYODA 2016). The driving factors for these techniques are abstraction, compositionality and independence from specific tools.

Therefore, the above paragraphs shows the tools and methods for SysML verification and Validation shows the approach for incorporation in the requirements of given case study. The methods are complex however with possible solutions they can be incorporated. The methods and tools such as B method, Enterprise Architect tools, SysML based framework and different techniques proposed by SysML verification and validation shows different ways of requirement modelling. The given case study of Cultural Heritage Institution could incorporate these methods and tools for requirement modelling by applying the above given methods where each method presents different ways.

The requirements for verification and validation is associated to professionalism and this can be described as follows. The verification and validation phase is an essential part of every system development cycle. This is because this phase is the ultimate assessor to assess and test the system for the final phase (Khan et al. 2015). The importance of verification and validation varies in different conditions or situations. The techniques are perceived differently by the engineers to approach the system requirement analysis. The techniques are tracing approaches, prototyping, requirements testing, professional verification and validation, user manual writing and reviews, inspection and feedback. The way verification and validation approaches to the system requirements are professional as they give complete assurance of any product and service. This phase does not only check and test, it also provides confirmation of correct requirement for the system and correctness of the system as per the requirement. Hence this shows that verification and validation proves professionalism in system requirement analysis and development to deliver a high quality product and services.

Conclusion 

The above discussions shows the analysis of requirement and system specifications that define development of project. The given case study of Cultural Heritage institutions is evaluated to provide a volere template, use case diagram, SysML requirements diagram and SysML block diagram for the diligent search of rightsholders. The discussion also focuses on prior technologies related with the area of federated database management systems and SysML for requirements verification and validation. Therefore, the discussions finally conclude the importance of system requirements and verification and validation and their role in system development. The future researches for this requirements analysis also needs to be taken into account for better future prospective.

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