Learning how to discover requirements

Requirements engineering (RE) is traditionally taught in academia using an RE process which starts from a well-defined problem. Our approach focuses on the early stages of requirements discovery where students have to learn both about the application domain and about what stakeholders feel is the problem. The approach comprises all the basic elements of requirements, and ways to discover them using many small discovery cycles. In this position paper we outline the rationale for our approach and reflect on our initial experiences with teaching undergraduate RE module using this approach

Enseñanza de elicitación de requerimientos

La necesidad mejorar las prácticas de Ingeniería de Requerimientos en los profesionales ha sido mencionada en la literatura y en los últimos años se ha desarrollado como tema de investigación en las carreras universitarias. Las dificultades de la elicitación de requerimientos de un sistema multiplican las dificultades de la enseñanza de esas técnicas a los estudiantes de las carreras de grado. En particular aquellas más directamente relacionadas con la interacción con los stakeholders, como es el caso de las entrevistas. Se escogió una organización del proceso de enseñanza tratando de resolver las dificultades habituales al tratar de reproducir experiencia de la vida real en el aula. La utilización de la observación como técnica de enseñanza en un curso de grado permite a los estudiantes reconocer las facetas que tiene una entrevista así como ayudarlos a reducir del nivel de ignorancia en cuanto al proceso de entrevistas. En el proyecto se utiliza la sala Gesell, la filmación de la actividad y el análisis de los documentos producidos por los participantes.Eje: Ingeniería de softwareRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Understanding the Role of Requirements in Engineering Design by Novices

Requirements play a critical role in the design process. The broader impact of this research is to develop a systematic understanding of the current use of requirements with an ultimate goal to develop guidelines and recommendations for more effective use of requirements throughout the design process. Thus, this research begins to answer the question about what is the role of requirements in design process and, specifically, its role in idea generation? The answer to this question is explored in three phases. The first phase is to understand how requirements are currently taught to students. To that end, two surveys were conducted. First, a review of ten design textbooks was conducted as an initial surrogate for understanding what is formally taught. This was done to understand the use of requirements within the design tools mentioned in the textbooks. Supplementing this, interviews of faculty involved in teaching design courses was conducted with faculty from mechanical engineering, industrial engineering, bioengineering, and materials science and engineering. While the interviews suggest that the use of requirements is distributed throughout the design process, in agreement with common practice, the instruction provided students, based on the survey of textbooks, focuses on requirements tools found exclusively in the conceptual design phase. Thus, a significant gap is identified in terms of lack of sufficient tools explaining the use of requirements. In order to understand the consequences of lack of tools and to develop a deeper understanding of how students are applying the requirements education imparted to them, a case study analysis was conducted with senior mechanical engineering design students in a capstone course. Data was collected from four teams working in parallel on the same design project in form of requirements documents from initial weeks and the final report deliverable. The findings from this study reveal that there is lack of uniformity in how students elicit requirements in the initial weeks of the project. The completeness and specificity of requirements increase from the initial weeks to the final week, as expected, as the students develop a better understanding of the problem. However, in terms of addressing the requirements, more requirements with one adjunct or numerical value, and thus low specificity, were addressed. Further, it was found that the requirements documents of novice designers (students) change in multiple ways. Currently, the students do not have tools or methods in place that would allow them to systematically manage the changes in requirements document. Finally, as a deeper dive into how requirements can impact a specific design activity, an empirical designer study was conducted to explore the impact of requirements elicitation in idea generation. The study was conducted, again, with senior mechanical engineering students at Clemson University. The findings from the experimental study suggest that the students elicit more non-functional requirements compared to functional requirements. However, the ratio of the number of non-functional to functional requirements decreases when considering only the requirements addressed during ideation. Further, comparing the requirements addressed in the solutions generated by the students, it is found that the group that was not primed with the task of eliciting requirements performed better in terms of addressing requirements when compared to other two groups. Ultimately, the findings from these studies are used to make several recommendations that will allow the students to systematically use the requirements at various design stages and enhance their current use of requirements. This dissertation presents both broad and focused research evidence with respect to the role that requirements play in engineering design based on student experiences. This does not imply that professionals behave in a similar manner. However, as the understanding of requirements in the education of the students is further developed, this can have a significant, albeit indirect, impact of the practice in industry as the students graduate

Investigating the Presence of Culture in Engineering Design: A Case Study on Culture in Design Methods, Perception, and Outcomes

Overwhelming global statistics on economic, social, and health disparities has driven engineers and designers to develop solutions to minimize these disparities [1,2,11,12,3–10]. For the scope of this study, these efforts are referred to as design for humanitarian engineering and global development (HEGD). HEGD solutions are designed to improve access to medical technologies, energy, clean water, and even spark economic development [1–10]. However, many HEGD solutions go unadopted, halting their intended benefits [9,13,22,23,14–21]. Efforts to improve HEGD adoption have focused on ways to incorporate culture in the design solution’s aesthetics or in approaches post-deployment [24,25,34,35,26–33]. However, a review of failed HEGD efforts with a cultural lens highlights one reason adoption suffers is that the design solutions lack cultural fit, not meeting cultural needs in design form and function [9,13,23,36–38,15–22]. A lack of cultural fit in design solutions suggests there may be a lack of consideration and representation of target user culture in the early design stages, particularly when making design requirements. This work focuses on describing the consideration and representation of target user culture when designers make design requirements. Using the cultural elements (Social Organization, Economic Systems, Language & Symbols, Customs & Traditions, Arts & Literature, Forms of Government, and Religion [39,40,49,41–48]), a 3-part study was conducted to understand the cultural representation and consideration when making design requirements. Three main factors influence the development of design requirements; the designer, the tool or method used to develop iii requirements, and the design requirements developed. Each part of this 3-part study describes cultural representation in one of the three main influences. The first study was a comparative analysis that focuses on understanding the frequency that target user culture is represented in engineering design requirements. Cultural frequencies in requirements from HEGD and non-global context projects were calculated and compared to highlight differences in cultural representation. The frequency of culture in HEGD design requirements was lower than for projects with no-global context. The second study explored the frequency of culture in engineering design methods by highlighting the information the methods explicitly encourage designers to collect. A thematic content analysis was conducted on 10 engineering design methods and themes were developed to represent the types of information methods encourage the designer to collect. Results show that engineering design methods encourage designers to collect cultural information, but methods fall short in relating the cultural information to design requirement development. The final study investigated cultural representation in the designer’s considerations when making design requirements. Using a quasi-experimental case study, designer considerations and design outcomes were captured, and the effects of the Cultural Elements Requirements Assessment (CERA) on consideration and outcomes were investigated. This study demonstrates that designers consider cultural information and generate cultural requirements. CERA also increased designer considerations for cultural information

Computational Representation And Reasoning Support For Requirements Change Management In Complex System Design

Requirements play a critical role within any design process and the activity of identifying and maintaining a system\u27s requirements is essential to. However, design is a complex and iterative process, where requirements are continuously evolving and are volatile. This change, if not managed, may result in undesired uncertainty within the design process leading to monetary losses and time delays, as the changing of requirements has been recognized as a major cause of project failure. In order to mitigate issues that arise due to requirement change propagation, this research presents a computational reasoning tool to help designers and engineers predict change propagation in the requirements domain. The developed tool makes use of requirements syntactical elements to build relationships between requirements. Two heterogeneous industry case studies, spanning four engineering change propagations, are used to both explore the use of requirements in predicting change propagation and generalize an automated prediction tool. Using design structure matrices and graph theoretic based metrics a predictive model is generalized from 491,520 relationship and metric permutation combinations. The developed tool makes use of an RMS scoring algorithm to rank requirements in order of most likely to change due to previous requirement changes. The developed tool is tested against a third industry case study where five engineering changes are predicted. Results indicate the tool can predict sixty percent of change propagation within the top four percent requirements scoring and predict all change propagation within the top thirteen percent scoring