Provenance Requirements
All partners of the project produced user requirements and scenarios from
which technical requirements of the Provenance Architecture were derived. As
part of this activity, we also included scenarios derived from national
projects, such as e-Diamond and myGrid, and other grid applications to make
the provenance architecture to be designed and developed generic. The
System Development Department of
SZTAKI developed an
on-line questionnaire to be
filled in by the project partners, other partners from national projects as
well as
EU FP6 projects in the grid area. The results of the questionnaire
were summarised and evaluated. The evaluation results were captured in the
User Requirements Document (URD)
and the Software Requirements Document
(SRD), which are in conformance with the recommendations of the ESA
Software Engineering Standard and covers the first two phases of the
software life cycle. Beyond the scientific and engineering domains, we also
captured broader e-Business requirements by involving the IBM members of the
project.
The definition of the user requirements was the responsibility of the
users, but the expertise of software engineers and researchers was used to
help define and review the user requirements. The scope of the software
system was established and the interfaces with other components were
identified. The following were determined: the operational environment of
the system; capabilities needed by users to solve the problem; constraints
placed by users on how the problem is to be solved; the human computer
interaction requirements; usage scenarios; the quality attributes of
adaptability, availability, portability, scalability and security.
The purpose of the software requirements phase was to analyse the
statement of user requirements in the URD and produce a set of technical and
software requirements as complete, consistent and correct as possible. The
problem was be analysed, as stated in the URD, and a coherent, comprehensive
description of what the software is to do was built. The output was the SRD,
which contains a developer’s view of the problem, rather than the user’s.
The SRD was the reference against which both the
design, as well
as the
aerospace and
medical
prototypes were verified.