Keynote by Ian Sommerville

“Requirements engineering for enterprise systems”

Many approaches to requirements engineering are behavioural and attempt to define required system features and functionality. They, typically, have a ‘single system’ focus. In this talk, I will argue that this approach to requirements engineering is inappropriate for extending ‘enterprise systems’ – systems of systems that support many different operations in an organization.

I will discuss an approach to requirements engineering which moves away from the behavioural approach to requirements engineering to focus on the information requirements of stakeholders in the enterprise. Information requirements are concerned with the information needed by stakeholders, the channels used to deliver that information and the issues and problems that arise if the information is not delivered in a timely manner. I will propose that a model of stakeholder responsibilities is an effective way of understanding and analyzing these information requirements.

Bio

Ian Sommerville is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, Scotland and was previously Professor of Software Engineering at Lancaster University. He is currently a principal investigator in the UK’s Large Scale Complex IT Systems research and training programme with interests in modelling complex systems of systems and in cloud computing. He has published extensively in software and requirements engineering and is the author of a widely-used software engineering textbook. He was awarded the 2011 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Educator award for his work in software and requirements engineering education.