Invited Presentations

In the morning of 29. March, the Industry Track at REFSQ 2011 features invited presentations of outstanding speakers from industry. They share their experiences and challenges, and present solutions with lessons learned to a mixed audience of practitioners and researchers. The program consists of four sessions covering different industries and requirements engineering topics:

Session 1: Elicitation & Specification – Tuesday, 29th of March, 9.00-10.30

Alexander Fronk, adesso AG, Germany – Eliciting Requirements: Experiences and Challenges

Abstract: In industrial projects, techniques for requirement elicitation and management are often seriously affected by restrictions in time and budget. This results in gradation of both requirements quality and coverage. Thus the elicitation of requirements follows a refinement process and should be organized incrementally with respect to time and budget such that customers’ expectations are satisfiable within any refinement step. Therefore, strategies and methods are needed that highly adapt to almost arbitrary project situations. We discuss such an incremental strategy based on a specific notation for requirement elicitation in heterogeneous groups and show its application within a tight time schedule.

CV: Dr. Alexander Fronk started his career as a scientist in the Software Technology research group at Dortmund University. There he gave lectures on software engineering. He focused his research activities on requirements engineering, using both formal and semi-formal graphic-based methods, on formal specifications of software systems and workflows, as well as on code analysis of large legacy software systems. Since 2008, Dr. Alexander Fronk has been working as a Senior Consultant in the fields of requirements engineering and workflow analysis, providing profound knowledge on public administration processes. He joined adesso in 2010, were he also coaches consultants in applying requirements engineering methods.

Markus Voelter, Itemis, Germany – Domain-Specific Languages for Requirements

Abstract: An important part of Requirements Engineering is capturing precisely what a software system is supposed to do. The challenge is to express these requirements precisely, without predetermining the way the system is designed or implemented. The use of natural language or “picture drawing” modeling languages leads to ambiguity and inconsistencies. Domain Specific Languages offer a way to solve this dilemma: they are built specifically to precisely represent information for a given domain. In this talk we present a couple of examples of how we have used DSLs for RE. Examples are based on various tools, including Eclipse and JetBrains MPS.

CV: Markus Völter works as an independent researcher, consultant and coach for itemis AG in Stuttgart, Germany. His focus is on software architecture, model-driven software development and domain specific languages as well as on product line engineering. Markus also regularly writes (articles, patterns, books) and speaks (trainings, conferences) on those subjects. Contact him via voelter at acm dot org or www.voelter.de.

Daniel Lucas-Hirtz, Exibri Consulting, France – Requirements Reuse and Product Lines

Abstract: Reuse is the holy grail of software engineering. On many contexts, especially market driven product engineering, efficient reuse management has been shown to drastically decrease time to market and development cost, while improving overall system quality.
Requirement engineering, as a foundation for the rest of the engineering, has a major impact on overall reuse efficiency.
Unfortunately, efficiently reusing requirements is everything but easy to put in practice.
In this talk we show how we’ve seen software requirements reuse put in practice in some multimedia and telecommunication contexts, and we illustrate what real life problem we’re faced with in this context.

CV: Daniel Lucas-Hirtz is a Requirements Engineering Trainer and Consultant, co-founder of exibri consultancy company in Rennes, France. With more than 15 years in the multimedia and telecommunication industry, Daniel trains Requirements Engineering and coaches teams with a focus on market driven product definition, innovation, user experience and portfolio planning. Key topics lately have been software re-use and product line engineering. Daniel has been in charge of the specification teams and processes for the European mobile phones portfolio of both Motorola and Mitsubishi. As member of the IREB, he is playing a key role in the translation of the IREB certification material to French, and in the porting of the overall IREB certification scheme in French speaking regions. Daniel is co-founder of the SPECIEF association for the promotion of Requirements Engineering in French (www.specief.org). He is lecturer at several French Universities and engineering schools.

Session 2: Tools & Seizing – Tuesday, 29th of March, 9.00-10.30

Andreas Schreiber, DLR, Germany – Requirements Engineering in Germany’s Research Center for Aeronautics and Space

Abstract: The development of software is a core activity at most DLR institutes. About a quarter of DLR’s manpower is assigned to it. Projects range from small software tools developed by students to large long-term cooperations with other research centers, academia, and industry. The kind of developed software is very also different. There are many small scripts with a limited lifetime (e.g., for prototyping) as well as large systems or critical real-time software. Furthermore, in most cases the software is developed by engineers or natural scientist who do not have any education in software engineering. The talk outlines the current status of software engineering at DLR with focus on requirements engineering. With examples from very different development projects, some of the used tools and methodologies for requirements engineering will be described. Also, the efforts for DLR-internal standardization and some of the research topics related to requirements management will be presented.

CV: Andreas Schreiber is scientist and head of the Department for Distributed Systems and Component Software of the German Aerospace Center’s (DLR) Simulation and Software Technology division. He received a degree in industrial mathematics from Technical University Clausthal. His research fields include distributed computing, Grid Computing, modern software architectures, user interfaces, and software engineering.

Juan Manuel Carrillo de Gea, University of Murcia, Spain – Survey on requirements engineering tools

Abstract: Requirements Engineering (RE) is known to be a key activity within the systems and software engineering lifecycle, to the point that if poor attention is paid to this activity, user needs and requirements might not be completely and correctly captured. This situation will lead to non-compliant products and, in consequence, higher costs and longer development times. The RE process must therefore be carried out carefully to ensure that a complete set of user needs and requirements is captured, transformed into a validated set of technical requirements and managed throughout the lifecycle using the RE process activities. To achieve this goal, software engineers usually rely on RE tools which provide support for many RE and lifecycle activities. It is therefore important to improve existing RE tools with the aim of facilitating stakeholders’ work, thus reducing or, ideally, completely removing product errors, and ensuring software quality and conformity with user needs. Moreover, the market for RE tools is simultaneously widespread, sparse and changing. Empirical research has been carried out in order to gain insights into how the industry actually works. RE tools vendor representatives working at various software development companies around the world were thus invited to fill in an online questionnaire. We realise that the current issues, trends and challenges in RE tools is a key concern if the gap between academic and industrial practice is to be filled, thus leading to a real possibility of applying academic suggestions to software development organizations. The findings obtained from this survey will be presented in the workshop.

CV: Juan Manuel Carrillo de Gea is a research assistant at the University of Murcia, Spain. He has a BSc in Nursing and a five-year BSc in Computer Science. He also has an MSc in Industrial Informatics from the University of Murcia. He has worked as a systems engineer for the AES Corporation and as a vocational training teacher in computer networks for a private school. His main research interests currently lie in requirements engineering, global software engineering and requirements management tools. He is also involved in other research lines such as computer-based learning and its application to health disciplines. He has had various peer-reviewed published papers in academic journals and conferences. He is a member of the Software Engineering Research Group led by Ambrosio Toval. This group has been working on RE since 1996.

Charles Symons - Sizing requirements using COSMIC: Uses and Benefits

Abstract: Estimating the effort for a new software development project usually means that the size of the requirements must be measured or estimated. But sizing requirements using the COSMIC method brings many other uses and benefits, including being able to:

• track the size of requirements as they grow and are refined, and thus control the project scope
• help control the quality of requirements (if they cannot be measured, they are certainly not clear enough to be developed)
• plan testing
• and, for real-time embedded software, estimate the required physical memory size

This talk will briefly introduce the topic of functional size measurement in general and the COSMIC method in particular. The latter is an internationally standardised method. Its design is based on fundamental software engineering principles and hence it applicable for sizing business, real-time and infrastructure software. I will explain the distinction of functional and non-functional requirements and the sizing of software at different levels of software decomposition and from various user viewpoints and how all this relates to the problems of estimating. This will help understand why this method is superior to older sizing methods.

Examples of the uses and benefits of applying the COSMIC method in real industrial cases will be presented, including

• use in the auto industry for estimating development effort and physical memory requirements
• use for demonstrating software development productivity improvement which had not been revealed when using older sizing methods
• controlling agile software development projects
• a process to integrate sizing with estimating to help control the scope and to deliver software projects to time and budget.

CV:Charles is semi-retired after 50 years in computing. After graduating in physics, he joined the UK Atomic Energy Authority where he first used a computer for experimental data analysis. He then worked at CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research in Geneva, as a scientific programmer and then became Operations Manager of the main data centre. Later he worked for Philips in the UK and Eindhoven, Netherlands, where he was responsible for Corporate IS standards and data administration. After a similar responsibility at Xerox, he moved into consulting, joining Nolan, Norton & Co, which became part of KPMG Management Consulting. In these roles he has led consulting studies on IS Strategy and improving the performance of the IS function in many parts of the world.
He became interested in the measurement of software for the purposes of measuring project performance and estimating when working for Xerox in the 1980’s. This led to his interest in improving methods for software size measurement. He developed the MkII FP method, which is still used to help control price/performance in outsourced UK Government IT contracts and represented the UK on the ISO Working group on Functional Size Measurement. He helped establish the Common Software Measurement International Consortium in 1988 and is the current President.

Session 3: Modeling & Quality – Tuesday, 29th of March, 11.00-12.30

Wolfgang Goerigk, B+M Informatik, Germany – Baseline Requirements for Model Driven Modernization Projects

Abstract: As with any software development, legacy modernization requires some degree of requirements management and requirements engineering. An important initial decision is the extent to which enhancements or new requirements should be part of the modernization project. On the one hand, the legacy application definitely defines a kind of requirements baseline, which renders legacy modernization special compared to classical software development. On the other hand, however, there would not be any need for talking about and spending money on modernization at all, if every requirement were satisfied by the legacy software as it is. Refactoring on its own is hardly enforceable in a business context, but even if, there are still requirements not yet met by the existing legacy software.
It seems generally a good advice to strictly limit the number of enhancements and new functional requirements, or to schedule them for a follow-on project, and to assume that the major goal of the modernization project is to transform existing functionality towards a modern target architecture and/or platform, i.e. to mainly focus on refactoring or architectural reorganization. But the legacy software very often provides the sound baseline for future development. The model based approach fits very well both for a model driven further development and for a formal support of identifying, eliciting, documenting, analyzing, tracing and agreeing on requirements.
The talk will discuss on a meta model, i.e. a set of notions and their relations, useful in order to capture requirements, and its specialization in the context of model driven modernization (MDM). The so called horse shoe metaphor for MDM is a priori based on the extraction and semantical enrichment of architectural models of the legacy and on MDSD for further development. But it seems to serve as an appropriate procedural model also to capture requirements actually raised by stake holders.

CV:
Wolfgang Goerigk joins the b+m Informatik AG, initiator and founder of the openArchitectureWare (oAW) open source initiative, as a senior software expert, senior architect and senior consultant since 2006. For many years he worked as a senior researcher and associate professor in computer science at the Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, teaching computer science also at the Justus-Liebig-University of Gießen, and, as has been a Visiting Scientist at Computational Logic Inc. and at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas. His major research topics are programming and modeling languages, semantics and verification, compiler construction, compiler verification, object orientation, software engineering, software verification, and software quality. He is the author of many scientific articles and book contributions, and he is speaker on many scientific and IT conferences.

Christian Nentwich, Model TwoZero, UK – Understanding and Traceability in Data-Heavy, Complex Integration Projects

Abstract: Model Two Zero, in collaboration with customers, has been pioneering the use of the open Natural Rule Language for formally specifying semantic constraints, transformations and data enrichments required in system integration architectures. This language, essentially a DSL specialised for common integration requirements, can act as an “executable specification” from which entire systems are generated.

In this talk, I will outline some of the challenges we have faced when attempted to deploy such an approach globally, and the difficulty of putting it into the hands of people with a large variety of technical skills and educational backgrounds.

CV: Christian Nentwich is the founder of Model Two Zero Limited, a software company based in London that produces components for high-complexity enterprise IT architectures. He has a long record of advising some of the world’s largest financial instutitions on standards and complex data architectures, and has been served on standards bodies including the Financial Products Markup Language (FpML) and the Object Management Group (OMG). Christian has been a speaker on several academic and industry conferences, as well as serving as acting as a reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. He holds a PhD and BSc in Computer Science from University College London.

Gauthier Fanmuy, ADN Consulting, France – Requirements Verification in the Industry

Abstract: Requirements Engineering is a discipline that has been promoted, implemented, deployed for more than 20 years… through the impulsion of standardization agencies (IEEE, ISO, ECSS, BNAé…) and national / international organizations such as AFIS, GfSE, INCOSE.
Since, despite an increasing maturity in Requirements Engineering, this discipline remains unequally understood and implemented, even in a same organization. Industry is now facing a diversity of challenges:

• “How to explain and make understandable the fundamentals of Requirements Engineering”,
• “How to be more effective in Requirements authoring”,
• “How to reach a Lean Requirements Engineering, in particular with improved knowledge management and the extensive use of modeling techniques”.

The presentation is about requirements verification during the specification and design phases (descending branch of a V-Model).

In a first part are presented the results of an AFIS study made end 2010 about Industrial Requirements Engineering practices, where 22 companies worldwide were involved through interviews and surveys.

In a second part are presented some innovative techniques and tools that are starting to be used in the industry for Requirements authoring and verification. In particular, the presentation will address:

• The use of Lexical analysis for correctness verification (in the form, not the substance)
• The use of Requirements boilerplates with Natural Language Processing (NLP) for writing assistance and checking
• The use of Ontologies with Natural Language Processing (NLP) to verify requirements consistency.

CV: Gauthier Fanmuy is the Technical Director at ADN, a Systems Engineering consulting company specialized in Requirements Engineering, Model Based Systems Engineering and Products Lines for complex and critical Systems. He has worked in the past years in the Automotive Industry at PSA Peugeot Citroen where he has deployed Requirements Engineering and DOORS in an engineering department.
He previously worked in the Aeronautic Industry at Dassault Aviation where he managed several projects such as integration of electro-optics sensors on military aircrafts, development of complex system functions and re-engineering of MMI in object oriented approaches.
He is also involved in AFIS (French Association on Systems Engineering) as Global Processes Technical Committee. He was the chair for about 10 years of the Requirements Engineering Working Group. He is involved in INCOSE as Chair an international WG: Systems Engineering for Very Small and Small Entities and small project (VSMEs), and as an active member of Requirements WG, Bio-Medical WG.
As member of the IREB, he is playing a key role in the translation of the IREB certification material to French, and in the porting of the overall IREB certification scheme in French speaking regions. He is co-founder of the SPECIEF association for the promotion of Requirements Engineering in French.

Session 4: Integrated RE – Tuesday, 29th of March, 11.00-12.30

Arnold Rudorfer, Siemens Healthcare, Germany – Agile Requirements Engineering in a Large Platform Project: Challenges, Solutions and Best Practices

Abstract: Medical device development is increasingly under market pressure to reduce deployment in critical care facilities. Further, budget cuts in critical care facilities drive process innovation mostly realized through a holistic integration of IT systems (hospital information systems, PACS and modalities). One important leverage to reduce development cycle time is to introduce learn/ agile requirements engineering approaches. Traditional V-model basded development processes cannot cope with the pressure from the market. Given that the content of software in medical device has risen bigger than 60% (compared to 30% by end of the ‘90s), lean/agile RE is becoming a paramount discipline for a development organization to remain competitive. Our own experience and an underlying business case show concrete cost savings in the project planning, testing and complexity reduction of the imaging platform architecture. A comparison of traditional to learn/ agile requirements engineering rounds up the picture incuding key take aways.

CV: Arnold Rudorfer is Director Software Initiative and Process Improvement in the Siemens Healthcare Imaging and Therapy Division. He is responsible for introducing new software engineering technologies with the goal to optimize engineering cost and development efficiency. Prior to joining Healthcare, he was the Head of the User Interface Design Center for Corporate Technology in the US. Later, he took over as the Global Technology Field Leader Requirements Engineering at Siemens Corporate Research (in Princeton, NJ, USA) with worldwide Centers of Competence (Munich, Erlangen and Beijing). He is co-author of the previously published book “Software Systems Requirements Engineering” (McGraw Hill, April 2009). Also, he is an organizer of Siemens Best Practice Sharing Events and speaker at Siemens-internal and international conferences on Software Engineering topics.

Jörg Gollnick, Lufthansa Systems Berlin GmbH, Germany – Integrated Requirements Engineering for Product Development and Maintenance

Abstract: This presentation shows how requirements engineering is integrated into the software production processes on the example of a nearly 19 year old software product for Airline Operations Control. It gives you an short overview about the software production processes in our team. The processes are described on high level (Incident, Problem, RfC, Release Management and Software development).
You get to know some key features of these processes and how they help us to produce and maintain a high quality software. Requirements are integrated in these processes and gave us the possibility to understand which requirement leads to which change in the code and which change in the code belongs to which requirement.

CV: Jörg Gollnick works as Application Manager at Lufthansa Systems Berlin. He is responsible for the whole maintenance of an Airline Operations Control Software. Product. Prior to that he worked in different roles for this product and has now a over 15 years experience with everyday processes for product maintenance and development. His special interests are on integrated, robust, customer orientated processes. He has graduated as engineer for transport automation at Hochschule für Verkehrswesen „Friedrich List“ Dresden in 1992.

Elisabeth Bjarnson, Sony Ericsson, Sweden – Integrated RE – Requirements Through-Out the Development Process

Abstract: The main purpose of requirements engineering is to support and guide development of successful products, which will appeal to the customers and result in profits for the company. This entails both capturing the ‘right’ requirements, both from a business and an engineering perspective, as well as, communicating them all the way throughout the project life-cycle, and not just in the initial requirements and design steps. In order to do this in a successful and efficient way, requirements engineering has to interact and co-operate with a number of other software engineering disciplines, like architecture, verification and validation, configuration management etc, ideally by integrating the requirements engineering with the more implementation-near work. Requirements then become a natural and obvious part of development, and not an activity performed in isolation, either in time or in roles, with the risk of becoming out of synch with the actual development. There is a major challenge involved in this, namely cross-disciplinary competence. For example, there have been many attempts to enable traceability between requirements and test cases, but few success stories. Merely setting up a tool that allows connecting requirements and test cases is not sufficient. A true integration of the two disciplines, including integrated processes and tool support, requires a cross-pollination of competences. A good understanding of both domains is needed to identify a well integrated solution that meets the needs to both disciplines. Integrating requirements into the more development-near disciplines is a way to enable the requirements to be ‘alive’ all the way through the project life cycle and support the projects in synchronizing the large amount of requirements and people involved in developing large-scale software. There are also potential gains in efficiency to found by researching and developing methods and techniques for Integrated Requirements Engineering.

CV: Elizabeth Bjarnason is Process Engineer at Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications. She is part of the process team that is responsible for the processes for developing software for mobile phones, and the main responsible for the requirements aspects of those processes. She has a long and wide experience within the company’s software development organization and has worked with software design, programming, project management, standardization, as well as, requirements for the software of mobile phones. Prior to joining Sony Ericsson (then Ericsson), she worked with developing educational software and smaller database applications, as well as, doing research into tool support for domain-specific languages. Through her experience of working with requirements as an integrated part of large-scale software development she has become interested in the area of Requirements Engineering and is currently working part time with the Software Engineering Research Group (SERG) at Lund University. Her main research interests are integrated and agile requirements engineering, including alignment between requirements and verification & validation.