Requirements engineering: a review and research agenda

This paper reviews the area of requirements engineering. It outlines the key concerns to which attention should be devoted by both practitioners, who wish to "reengineer" their development processes, and academics, seeking intellectual challenges. It presents an assessment of the state-of-the-art and draws conclusions in the form of a research agenda

Applying cognitive informatics to improve communication in geographically distributed environments

When stakeholders are geographically distributed, elicitation process becomes more difficult and communication between all the participants presents new challenges for software engineering community. Considering characteristics of interpersonal communication and the virtual area where it is carried out, we aim at improving the quality of elicitation results by applying concepts from a new transdisciplinary science called Cognitive Informatics.Eje: Análisis de RequerimientosRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Classifying groupware tools to improve communication in geographically distributed elicitation

In a scene where stakeholders are geographically distributed, communication presents new challenges for research areas. Considering the characteristics of interpersonal communication and the virtual area where it is carried out, the importance of applying interdisciplinary approaches, such as Cognitive Engineering, is currently increasing. Particularly, our proposal aims at improving the interaction between stakeholders by applying learning models when eliciting distributed software requirements. These models might help characterise the way people interact with distributed environment abstracting information or procedures. Identifying a type of interaction a stakeholder is more suitable for, would led to the use of specific groupware tools as a way of improving communication during a requirements elicitation process.Eje: Ingeniería de Software y Bases de Datos (ISBD)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Using fuzzy sets to analyse personal preferences on groupware tools

When stakeholders are geographically distributed communication presents new challenges for software engineering community. In order to improve communication between stakeholders, we have previously proposed to apply learning style models to characterise the way people interact. In this work we enhance that model, using fuzzy reasoning, to find a set of rules that tell us which groupware tools are more suitable according to stakeholders classification.Eje: I - Workshop de Ingeniería de Software y Base de DatosRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

A cognitive approach to improve software engineering processes

Cognitive Informatics is a new research area that combines concepts from cognitive sciences and informatics. Particularly, classification according to cognitive styles or learning styles is a common practise in educational and business areas in order to obtain better performance from people involved in learning and collaborative tasks. Humanintensive processes in software engineering make it similar to those areas. In this paper, we propose using a kind of people classification to improve those processes of software engineering where human behaviour is a critical influence on their success.Eje: Ingeniería en SoftwareRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Effectiveness of Elicitation Techniques in Distributed Requirements Engineering

Software development teams are often geographically distributed from their customers and end users. This creates significant communication and coordination challenges that impact the effectiveness of requirements engineering. Travel costs, and the local availability of quality technical staff increase the demand for effective distributed software development teams. This research reports an empirical study of how groupware can be used to aid distributed requirements engineering for a software development project. Six groups of seven to nine members were formed and divided into separate remote groups of customers and engineers. The engineers conducted a requirements analysis and produced a software requirements specification (SRS) document through distributed interaction with the remote customers. We present results and conclusions from the research including: an analysis of factors that effected the quality of the Software Requirements Specification document written at the conclusion of the requirements process and the effectiveness of requirements elicitation techniques which were used in a distributed setting for requirements gathering

CEPE: a cooperative editor for processes elicitation

Companies nonnally hire extemal consultants to carry out their Business Process Re-engineering. While this can be straightforward in the short tenn, it does not produce the desired result on the mid and long tenns. A low leveI of workers' involvement with a consequent resistance to changes, and a continuous dependency on extemal consultancy are the main drawbacks. We propose an altemative approach to BPR, specifically to Workflow Design, where company workers play an active and important role in re-designing the organization's processes in a cooperative style. The paper describes the essence of a BPR method based on participatory design and stepwise refinement, which we believe, will generate better results than the traditional approach. We also present CEPE -Cooperative Editor for Processes Elicitation -, which is a cooperative graphic editor that supports the processes knowledge building. That is the second phase of the proposed method

Supporting collaboration within the eScience community

Collaboration is a core activity at the heart of large-scale co- operative scientific experimentation. In order to support the emergence of Grid-based scientific collaboration, new models of e-Science working methods are needed. Scientific collaboration involves production and manipulation of various artefacts. Based on work done in the software engineering field, this paper proposes models and tools which will support the representation and production of such artefacts. It is necessary to provide facilities to classify, organise, acquire, process, share, and reuse artefacts generated during collaborative working. The concept of a "design space" will be used to organise scientific design and the composition of experiments, and methods such as self-organising maps will be used to support the reuse of existing artefacts. It is proposed that this work can be carried out and evaluated in the UK e-Science community, using an "industry as laboratory" approach to the research, building on the knowledge, expertise, and experience of those directly involved in e-Science

Supporting knowledge exchange isn't easy: lessons learnt from a case study

A knowledge management system is introduced in a large insurance company. It is meant to become a virtual knowledge network for a group of insurance professionals. Despite the fact that the introduction was met with enthusiasm and user participation in the design was ensured, the system did not live up to the expectations. In this paper we investigate this failure by uncovering and analyzing the requirements engineering processes underlying the system's\ud conception, design and introduction. The demise of the system can be attributed to a lack of attention for the use context of the end users and a tendency in the development process to focus mostly on the technical solution instead of problem analysis