performance requirements definition

Existing research lacks systematic methods to assess how requirements engineering (RE) impacts downstream development activities, hindering RE process optimization. Method: This paper proposes the first fitness-for-purpose RE impact assessment model, integrating a systematic literature review with multi-source empirical data to identify and structure 24 downstream development activities affected by requirements and 16 quantifiable attributes. Contribution/Results: The model bridges two critical gaps in requirements quality assessment—namely, the “activity dimension” and “measurability of impact”—by enabling empirical analysis of how specific requirements artifacts and processes concretely influence development practices. It provides a theoretically grounded framework and evidence-based decision support for precise, targeted optimization of the RE phase.

Software maintainability is frequently overlooked in requirements engineering, often addressed only implicitly through informal specifications or tool-based suggestions, without explicit goals or proactive management. This paper proposes a systematic framework for defining explicit maintainability requirements goals. It introduces the first adaptation of the QUPER model to the maintainability domain, integrating quantitative maintainability measurement tools and industry benchmarks to enable organizations to specify measurable, traceable, and actionable goals. The framework is developed and empirically validated using design science research methodology, with industrial case studies confirming its effectiveness in elevating maintainability’s priority within development decision-making. Key contributions include: (1) establishing maintainability as an explicit, goal-oriented requirement engineering concern; (2) providing the first QUPER-based approach for modeling and calibrating maintainability goals; and (3) delivering a practical, process-integrated solution deployable within real-world requirements engineering workflows.

This study addresses the challenge of transforming stakeholder requirements into product requirements in software-driven automotive systems. Leveraging a dataset of 8,082 stakeholder requirements and 5,870 product requirements provided by Infineon, the research employs a hybrid methodology integrating structural statistics, decision modeling, traceability mining, textual analysis, and hardware-software linkage to systematically analyze the requirement refinement process. It reveals, for the first time, that requirement complexity primarily stems from ambiguous architectural scope and missing contextual information rather than linguistic redundancy. The work establishes a classification framework for mapping stakeholder to product requirements, identifies systematic differences across abstraction levels, and proposes key improvements in requirement validation, deviation management, and contextual tooling to support efficient and reusable automotive development.

This work proposes a systematic approach to derive task effectiveness requirements in the absence of explicit user needs. The method deconstructs task intent into context, functionality, constraints, critical dimensions, performance attributes, and architectural solutions, and introduces a task complexity factor to quantify the impact of external challenges and technology maturity. By integrating Best-Worst Scaling, it prioritizes critical dimensions based on stakeholder judgments. Through task decomposition modeling and quantitative complexity analysis, the framework supports integration with UAF/SysML artifacts and establishes a traceable mechanism for generating Tier 1 and Tier 2 requirements. The approach is validated using a close air support mission case study, effectively addressing a critical gap in requirements engineering when clear initial inputs are unavailable.

Conventional requirements engineering tools lack direct access to SysML architecture models, leading to redundant requirement definitions, semantic fragmentation, and broken traceability. Method: This paper proposes an executable, structured requirements metamodel that integrates INCOSE requirements writing practices with SysML modeling capabilities. Strictly aligned with ISO/IEC/IEEE 29148 and INCOSE guidelines, it leverages a SysML Profile extension, an MBSE integration framework, and a compliance rule engine to enable native interoperability between requirements and architecture models. Contribution/Results: The metamodel was deployed and validated on two real-world NASA JPL space systems. It significantly improves requirement semantic completeness and verifiability, enhances coverage of the NASA Systems Engineering Handbook checklist, and—critically—provides the first empirical evidence of rapid improvement in requirements expression quality. The evaluation also identifies key bottlenecks in current toolchains regarding automated support for such integrated practices.

This study addresses the limitations of existing SysML verification approaches, which are often tool-dependent and restricted to performance properties, lacking support for automated validation of behavioral and interface requirements. To overcome these shortcomings, this work proposes a tool-agnostic, automated verification workflow driven by SysML test cases, integrating UML Testing Profile and behavioral diagram constructs to enable unified validation of multidimensional attributes—including behavior, timing, and state responses. The methodology was developed through a mixed-methods research strategy combining literature review and stakeholder interviews, and its efficacy was empirically validated across two independent SysML toolchains. The approach not only transcends the constraints of conventional parametric methods but also enables automatic traceability of verification results back to the original model elements.

This study addresses the lack of traceable, structured linkage between high-level requirements and low-level automated testing in AI-enabled cyber-physical systems, which hinders compliance with regulatory demands for verifiable evidence. To bridge this gap, the paper introduces VNVSpec, a novel framework that enables end-to-end automated traceability and closed-loop verification from high-level engineering requirements to test cases. VNVSpec employs machine-readable verification and validation (V&V) specifications to support requirement ingestion, quality checks, metric-driven decomposition, test result association, and generation of audit-ready reports, all integrated into a continuous integration pipeline. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that the approach verifies 36 requirements against 449 tests in linear time, scales to tens of thousands of artifacts, and is fully reproducible through open-sourced code, test suites, and benchmark scripts.

This work addresses the challenge of balancing software quality, testability, and maintainability under rapid iteration and frequent requirement changes. It proposes Algorithm-Driven Development (ADD), a novel approach that unifies requirements specification and technical design by using algorithm flowcharts as a single, coherent artifact. This integration enables end-to-end modeling of requirements, architecture, and testing. Leveraging this model, the system automatically generates high-coverage acceptance tests and incorporates continuous integration with code coverage feedback. Industrial adoption at Dassault Systèmes demonstrates that ADD achieves over 95% code coverage, substantially reduces defect density, and ensures a stable delivery cadence, outperforming conventional test-driven development and test-after approaches.

This work addresses the challenge of ensuring trustworthiness and stakeholder alignment in machine learning system development, which is often hindered by the absence of systematic requirements engineering. To bridge this gap, the authors propose REAL, a novel framework that uniquely integrates failure mode analysis into the requirements engineering process. REAL establishes a tripartite principle centered on data, model, and holistic system requirements, enabling iterative and traceable requirement refinement. Through a model-driven, stakeholder-oriented design, REAL demonstrates substantial improvements in requirement satisfaction in an autonomous driving case study. The authors further support reproducibility by releasing an open-source implementation toolkit.

This study addresses the inefficiencies and impeded knowledge transfer arising from fragmented verification and validation (V&V) practices at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). To overcome these challenges, this work proposes a unified V&V architecture grounded in human-centered design. By decoupling methodologies while maintaining a common attribute set, the architecture achieves bidirectional traceability through relational design and platform-independent SysML modeling. Furthermore, it establishes a comprehensive toolchain by integrating the Jama platform, modular templates, and digital thread technologies. This research effectively balances engineering rigor with agility, facilitating process automation, pattern reuse, and efficient cross-project collaboration. Ultimately, it provides a scalable and unified paradigm for the V&V of complex systems.