Retrospective and Trends in

Requirements Engineering for

Embedded Systems: A
Systematic Literature Review
Tarcsio Pereira, Deivson Albuquerque, Ada
Sousa, Fernanda Alencar and Jaelson Castro

CIn.ufpe.br
Outline
Motivation;
Goals;
Related Works;
Systematic Literature Review;
Key Results of the Study;
Threats to Validity;
Conclusions and Future Works.

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Motivation
Embedded Systems (ES) are present in
different domains such as automation technology,
automotive, avionics, energy technology or
medical technology.

Broy (1999) defines Embedded System as a

system that regulates a physical device by
sending control signals to actuators in reaction to
input signals provided by its users and by sensors
capturing the relevant state parameters of the
system.

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Motivation
According to Broy (1999), in the embedded
system domain, more than 50% of the problems
occur when the system is delivered.
[misconceptions in capturing requirements];

Challenge of market pressure;

Companies have to produce high-quality and

innovative products
in short time;

A requirements engineering process is crucial to

meet time, cost, and quality goals (Sikora, 2012);
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Goals

The goal of our work is to provide insights into

trends and needs in RE for ES research.
To this end, we analyzed the results of a
Systematic Literature Review, from which we
classified and analyzed evidence from 75 studies.

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Goals
The SLR addressed the following questions:

(1) What requirements should be considered

during embedded systems development?
(2) What are the requirements engineering
contributions for embedded systems? and
(3) What challenges/problems are identied in
research literature relating to RE for ES?

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Related Works

Sousa et al. (2015) performed a SLR on

requirements elicitation and specification for
embedded
Characteristics
systems;
Sousa et al. (2015) Pereira et al. (2017)

Time interval 2000 - 2014 1970 - 2016

RE activities Elicitation and specification Elicitation, analysis and

negotiation, specification,
validation, and management

Number of databases 6 7

It is important to highlight that our research

questions are different from those proposed in
Sousa et al. (2015); 7 CIn.ufpe.br
Related Works

Sikora et al. (2012) conducted an industrial

survey to investigate what were the current
industry needs concerning method support for
requirements engineering in the ES domain;
Characteristics Sikora et al. (2012) Pereira et al. (2017)

Research method Industrial survey Systematic Literature Review

Context Industry Academy and Industry

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Systematic Literature Review
(SLR)
A SLR is an exploratory study to investigate
evidence in the literature about a specific theme
(Kitchenham, 2009);
Source selection and Search
ScienceDirect, ISI Web of Science, Scopus,
SpringerLink, ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore,
and Compendex.

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Systematic Literature Review
(SLR)
The selected studies are:
Primary studies;
Studies that discuss RE for ES;
Published since 1970 until September 2016;
and
Satisfy the minimum quality threshold (50%).

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Systematic Literature Review
(SLR)
QUALITY ASSESSMENT

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Systematic Literature Review
(SLR)
QUALITY ASSESSMENT

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Systematic Literature Review
Process

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 Key Results of the Study
Requirements for Embedded Systems
What requirements should be considered during
embedded systems development?

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 Key Results of the Study
Requirements for Embedded Systems

Enterprise Level
Multiple stakeholders;
Execution environment;
System Level
Desired behavior and system behavior;
Environmental assumptions;
Requirements Level
Software/Hardware constraints;
Integration between hardware and software;
Context Level
System behavior;

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 Key Results of the Study
Requirements Engineering Contributions for
Embedded Systems
What are the requirements engineering
contributions for embedded systems?

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 Key Results of the Study
Requirements Engineering Contributions for
Embedded Systems
What are the requirements engineering
contributions for embedded systems?

(P1) Integration between requirements and

architecture;
(P2) Specification of safety requirements;
(P7) Integration between hardware and software;
(P18) Specification of electronic control unit (ECU);

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 Key Results of the Study
Research Needs on Requirements
Engineering for Embedded Systems
What challenges/problems are identified in
research literature relating to RE for ES?"

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 Key Results of the Study
Research Needs on Requirements
Engineering for Embedded Systems
What challenges/problems are identified in
research literature relating to RE for ES?"

(O1) Apply the proposed study in industry

embedded systems project;
(O6) Specification of safety requirements;
(O19) Specification of user interface for embedded
systems;
(O22) Variability in embedded systems
development;

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 Threats to Validity

To avoid the risk of omitting relevant studies we

evaluated our search string several times;

We executed the search string several times in

the digital libraries to identify the weaknesses
and provided some refinements in order to obtain
better results;

We also used seven different search engines to

omit the limitations implied by employing a
particular one;

Subjective decisions may have occurred since 20 CIn.ufpe.br

some papers did not provide a clear description or
Conclusion

We presented trends and needs in RE for ES

research based on the results of a SLR;

We pointed out (i) specific requirements that RE

researchers should consider, the (ii) contributions
of the extensive research on RE for embedded
systems, and (iii) we highlight the
challenges/problems regarding RE for embedded
systems.

This work may help RE researchers to focus their

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work on more relevant needs on RE for embedded
Conclusion

The most relevant findings from this review and

their implications for further research are as
follows.
Need to improve the specification and analysis
of timing requirements;
Need to improve the specification and analysis
of the NFRs;
Need of integration tools;
Need to include RE standards;
Need to apply the studies on real industry
projects;
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Future Work

We will exploit the study results to enhance our

RE process for embedded systems;

We also intend to continue this SLR to answer the

following research questions:
i) what phases of the requirements engineering
process have been supported by the
approaches?;
ii) what are the domains that the approaches
support?; and
iii) what style (scenario-based, goal-oriented,
etc.) of software requirements modeling have
been supported by the studies? 23 CIn.ufpe.br
References

A. Sousa, C. Agra, J. Melo, and F. Alencar, Requirements elicitation

and specification for embedded systems: a systematic literature
review, Requirements Engineering Workshop: Lima, Peru, 2015.
B. Kitchenham, O. P. Brereton, D. Budgen, M. Turner, J. Bailey, and
S. Linkman, Systematic literature reviews in software
engineering a systematic literature review, Information and
software technology, vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 715, 2009.
T. C. Pereira, Bvccon-tool: A modelling tool to support a dynamic
business process configuration approach, Masters thesis, Federal
University of Pernambuco, Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil, 2014.
B. F. Braga and J. P. A. Almeida, Modeling stories for conceptual
model assessment, in International Conference on Conceptual
Modeling. Springer, 2015, pp. 293303.

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 Thank
You!

Petrolina - Brazil
25 CIn.ufpe.br
 Retrospective and Trends in
Requirements Engineering for
Embedded Systems: A
Systematic Literature Review
Tarcsio Pereira, Deivson Albuquerque, Ada
Sousa, Fernanda Alencar and Jaelson Castro

CIn.ufpe.br