Addressing Challenges of Ultra Large Scale System on Requirements Engineering

AbstractAccording to the growing evolution in complex systems and their integrations, Internet of things, communication, massive information flows and big data, a new type of systems has been raised to software engineers known as Ultra Large Scale (ULS) Systems. Hence, it requires dramatic change in all aspects of “Software Engineering” practices and their artifacts due to its unique characteristics.Attendance of all software development members is impossible to meet in regular way and face-to-face, especially stakeholders from different national and organizational cultures. In addition, huge amount of data stored, number of integrations among software components and number of hardware elements. Those obstacles constrict design, development, testing, evolution, assessment and implementation phases of current software development methods.In this respect, ULS system that's considered as a system of systems, has gained considerable reflections on system development activities, as the scale is incomparable to the traditional systems since there are thousands of different stakeholders are involved in developing software, were each of them has different interests, complex and changing needs beside there are already new services are being integrated simultaneously to the current running ULS systems.The scale of ULS systems makes a lot of challenges for Requirements Engineers (RE). As a result, the requirements engineering experts are working on some automatic tools to support requirement engineering activities to overcome many challenges.This paper points to the limitations of the current RE practices for the challenges forced by ULS nature, and focus on the contributions of several approaches to overcome these difficulties in order to tackle unsolved areas of these solutions.As a result, the current approaches for ULS miss some RE essential practices related to find vital dependent requirements, and are not capable to measure the changes impact on ULS systems or other integrated legacy systems, in addition the requirements validation are somehow depended on the user ratings without solid approval from the stakeholders