Designing and assessing a course on prioritization and importance assessment in strategic non-routine requirements engineering processes

In this contribution, we present a course for making stakeholders in requirements engineering (RE) processes aware of the relevance of importance assessment (the thinking process that they go through while assessing requirement weights) and giving them some experience with specific aspects of the importance assessment process. We also analyze the experiences of the participants in five pilot sessions. In RE instruments, elicitation of requirement weights receives much attention. However, the processes that individual stakeholders go through while assessing weights are largely ignored or seen as a ‘black box’. In the course, participants gain experience with some common issues and pitfalls in assessing weights. Issues covered are: completeness and interdependence of requirements, causal relationships and the common denominator, handling ‘irrational’ requirements, and the meaning of ‘importance’ (priority). The course was given in various large organizations in the aerospace sector, and data on participants’ experiences were gathered by means of a standardized questionnaire. The extent to which the participants claimed they learned about the relevance of importance assessment and about how to perform it were, respectively, 2.89 and 2.72 on a scale from 1 to 5. The relevance of the various assignments was rated between 3.74 and 4.00 on a 1–5 scale. Our study indicates that the course, or elements of it, should be embedded in an organization’s work practices in order to achieve lasting effect

An algebraic framework for compositional design of autonomous and adaptive multiagent systems

Doctor of PhilosophyDepartment of Computing and Information SciencesScott A. DeLoachOrganization-based Multiagent Systems (OMAS) have been viewed as an effective paradigm for addressing the design challenges posed by today’s complex systems. In those systems, the organizational perspective is the main abstraction, which provides a clear separation between agents and systems, allowing a reduction in the complexity of the overall system. To ease the development of OMAS, several methodologies have been proposed. Unfortunately, those methodologies typically require the designer to handle system complexity alone, which tends to lead to ad-hoc designs that are not scalable and are difficult to maintain. Moreover, designing organizations for large multiagent systems is a complex and time-consuming task; design models quickly become unwieldy and thus hard to develop. To cope with theses issues, a framework for organization-based multiagent system designs based on separation of concerns and composition principles is proposed. The framework uses category theory tools to construct a formal composition framework using core models from the Organization-based Multiagent Software Engineering (O-MASE) framework. I propose a formalization of these models that are then used to establish a reusable design approach for OMAS. This approach allows designers to design large multiagent organizations by reusing smaller composable organizations that are developed separately, thus providing them with a scalable approach for designing large and complex OMAS. In this dissertation, the process of formalizing and composing multiagent organizations is discussed. In addition, I propose a service-oriented approach for building autonomous, adaptive multiagent systems. Finally, as a proof of concept, I develop two real world examples from the domain of cooperative robotics and wireless sensor networks

Merging individual conceptual models of requirements

While it is acknowledged that system requirements will never be complete, incompleteness is often due to an inadequate process and methods for acquiring and tracking a representative set of requirements. Viewpoint development has been proposed to address these problems. We offer a viewpoint development approach that fits easily into the current practice of capturing requirements as use case descriptions. However, current practice does not support visualization of use case descriptions, the capture of multiple use case descriptions, the modeling of conflicts and the reconciliation of viewpoints. In our approach we apply techniques from natural language processing, term subsumption and set-theory to automatically convert the use case descriptions into a line diagram. The visualisation of use case descriptions is a natural addition to the object-oriented design of systems using the Unified Modelling Language where diagrams act as communication and validation devices. RECOCASE is a comprehensive methodology that includes use case description guidelines, a controlled language to support natural language translation, a requirements engineering process model and a tool to assist the specification and reconciliation of requirements. Our approach combines group and individual processes to minimise contradictions and missing information and maximise ownership of the requirements models. In this paper we describe each of the parts of our methodology following an example through each section.11 page(s