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Information about upcoming events of interest to Computer Society members. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Software reuse can be defined as the process of creating software products from the existing ones rather than developing software from scratch. Thus, software reuse is normally proposed to increase software productivity and quality and leads to economic benefits. In this sense, the reuse of software requirements has received important attention because it provides a solid support to develop quality software through obtaining and reusing quality software requirements [i.e., software product line (SPL) approach used in large-sized software enterprises]. However, the small-sized enterprises-which represent up to 85 % of all software organizations in many countries around the world-cannot implement a SPL approach because it does not fit with the context, properties, and complexity of their software projects. Moreover, the software engineering community has not adequately explored a more proper approach in the context of small-sized software enterprises. The use of a software requirements catalog could be this proper approach. In this context, the aim of this paper was to introduce the requirements reuse model for software requirements catalog (RRMSRC). Also, a set of guidelines to perform the main activities defined for reusing functional requirements within small-sized software enterprises is provided. As evidence of its feasibility, RRMSRC has been used in an industrial context, and the obtained results and learned lessons are summarized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many safety-critical computer systems are required to monitor and control physical processes. The four-variable model, which has been used successfully in industry for almost four decades, helps to clarify the behaviors of, and the boundaries between the physical processes, input/output devices, and software. In this model, the acceptable behaviors of the software are constrained by the physical environment, system requirements, and input/output devices. If acceptable software behaviors are possible, then the system requirements are said to be implementable with respect to these constraints. The only acceptability condition proposed in the literature deems as acceptable software behaviors that can lead to undesirable system behaviors, in particular, nondeterministic system behaviors that for the same input sometimes do not produce any results and some other times produce expected results. In this sense, the acceptability condition can be seen as angelic. In this paper we strengthen the acceptability condition using the demonic calculus of relations such that no undesirable system or software behaviors are allowed and prove a necessary and sufficient implementability condition for the system requirements. As a byproduct, we also obtain a mathematical characterization of the least restrictive software specification, which, for all intents and purposes, can play the role of the software requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]