Teaching Model-based Requirements Engineering to Industry Professionals: An Experience Report

The use of conceptual models to foster requirements engineering has been proposed and evaluated as beneficial for several decades. For instance, goal-oriented requirements engineering or the specification of scenarios are commonly done using conceptual models. Bringing such model-based requirements engineering approaches into industrial practice typically requires industrial training. In this paper, we report lessons learned from a training program for teaching industry professionals model-based requirements engineering. Particularly, we as educators and learners report experiences from designing the training program, conducting the actual training, and applying the instructed material in our day-to-day work. From these findings we provide guidelines for educators designing requirements engineering courses for industry professionals

The role of formalism in system requirements (full version)

A major determinant of the quality of software systems is the quality of their requirements, which should be both understandable and precise. Most requirements are written in natural language, good for understandability but lacking in precision. To make requirements precise, researchers have for years advocated the use of mathematics-based notations and methods, known as "formal". Many exist, differing in their style, scope and applicability. The present survey discusses some of the main formal approaches and compares them to informal methods. The analysis uses a set of 9 complementary criteria, such as level of abstraction, tool availability, traceability support. It classifies the approaches into five categories: general-purpose, natural-language, graph/automata, other mathematical notations, seamless (programming-language-based). It presents approaches in all of these categories, altogether 22 different ones, including for example SysML, Relax, Eiffel, Event-B, Alloy. The review discusses a number of open questions, including seamlessness, the role of tools and education, and how to make industrial applications benefit more from the contributions of formal approaches. (This is the full version of the survey, including some sections and two appendices which, because of length restrictions, do not appear in the submitted version.)Comment: Fourth version (15 April 2020). This is the full version, including some sections and 2 appendices not appearing in the short versio