Software Requirements Monitoring is the activity of determining whether a software system is meeting its requirements. There are a multitude of uses for, styles of, and means to accomplish such monitoring. The following provides a guide to these concerns, and pointers to relevant work.

CS3's NSF profile

transfer of information, e.g., alerting users when they are using a system in a manner for which its design was not intended; alterting designer when system is being operated in novel ways

customization and maintenance, e.g., alerting systems administrator of the need to reconfigure the system based on altered patterns of use

Software packages requiring customization

Groupware

Small systems operating in unpredictable environments

• Who are the issuers of monitoring queries?

System administrators (i.e., knowledgable of the environment in which the monitored system resides, but not necessarily of the system itself; likely to be conversant with computer programming languages)

Software package designers (i.e., knowledgable of the design of the monitored system, and likely to be conversant with computer programming languages)

End users (i.e., knowldgeable of the uses to which they wish to put the monitored system; ignorant of the design details of that system; not necessarily conversant with computer programming languages)

• How are those queries expressed?

Event language (i.e., a formal language, but one expressly built to ease concise and convenient expression of event queries)

GUI interfaces (e.g., alert levels on gauges)

• Is the repertoire of queries small or large? Pre-set of user-selectable? Fixed or dynamic?

Large, user-selectable, dynamic (new queries can be added on-the-fly).

• Who are the recipients of those answers?

Systems administrators, end-users, designers, or even the monitored system itself.

• How are those answers expressed?

Pop-up notifications

Summary log files, and visualizations of them (e.g., charts/graphs)

Standardized (for most monitoring applications) GUI events (e.g., warning lights; gauge levels)

Customized (application specific) GUI events

• How is data gathered from the monitored system?

Wrapper

Message Bus

Repository

Modified program

• Is the "probe" effect a concern?

NO. Assumption that the monitored system's environment has computational capacity to spare, and so that that the additional burden of monitoring is unlikely to perturb the results of monitoring.

• How are queries converted into run-time monitoring code?

Automatically compiled

Running prototypes of: monitoring language, language compiler, simple instances of data-gathering mechanisms, and simple notification mechanisms.