Supporting Engineering Process Compliance via Generation of Detailed Guidance Actions

In regulation-intensive domains, software engineering organizations need to demonstrate compliance with process and traceability guidelines. To this end, novel approaches have emerged that support these activities via the automatic checking of constraints. Yet, engineers still need to decide how to fix violated constraints. While some general-purpose state-of-the-art constraint-checking approaches provide basic support for fixing constraint violations, the provided fixing recommendations often lack crucial details. The approaches typically do not analyze the overall constraint to identify which constraint sub-expressions put a restriction on the possible fixing action. For example, a fix suggests "set the parent of requirement R1 to an issue" rather than additionally stating that the "issue needs to be of type 'Change Request' and in state 'Released" '. Engineers, therefore, require mental effort to identify such restrictions by analyzing the constraint in detail or require extra time to try out which action completely fixes the constraint violation. In this paper, we propose a mechanism that determines restrictions automatically. We assessed the relevance of our mechanism by inspecting historical engineering data at our industry partner ACME-ATC and found that > 92% of actions that engineers executed to fix a violation were non-trivial, i.e., were subject to a restriction. In a controlled experiment, we then obtained preliminary confirmation that our produced restrictions are readable and helpful: on average, participants could complete tasks with restriction details quicker than tasks without restriction details.