Supporting Knowledge Elicitation and Analysis for Business Process Improvement through a Modeling Tool

Business Process Improvement (BPI) is a high priority topic for modern enterprises. However, due to the distributed knowledge, conducting BPI projects has become challenging in times of inter-organizational business networks. For supporting the elicitation, analysis, and sharing of knowledge by practitioners, we describe how semi-formally described domain knowledge on BPI and knowledge on problem-solving techniques is transformed into an implementation-oriented representation in the form of a modeling tool. Thus, we revert to the FDMM formalism (Formalism for Describing ADOxx Meta Models and Models) that permits to bridge the gap between semi-formal meta models and those that are executable on the ADOxx meta modeling platform

Rationale Management Challenges in Requirements Engineering

Rationale and rationale management have been playing an increasingly prominent role in software system development mainly due to the knowledge demand during system evaluation, maintenance, and evolution, especially for large and complex systems. The rationale management for requirements engineering, as a commencing and critical phase in software development life cycle, is still under-exploited. In this paper, we first survey briefly the state-of-the-art on rationale employment and applications in requirements engineering. Secondly, we identify the challenges in integrating rationale management in requirements engineering activities in order to promote further investigations and define a research agenda on rationale management in requirements engineering.

Requirements analysis for decision-support system design: evidence from the automotive industry

The purpose of this paper is to outline the requirements analysis that was carried out to support the development of a system that allows engineers to view real-time data integrated from multiple silos such as Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Warranty systems, in a single and visual environment. The outcome of this study provides a clear understanding of how engineers working in different phases of the product-lifecycle could utilise such information to improve the decision making process and as a result design better products. This study uses data collected via in-depth semi-structured interviews and workshops that includes people working in various roles within the automotive sector. In order to demonstrate the applicability this approach, SysML diagrams are also provided

Risk and Business Goal Based Security Requirement and Countermeasure Prioritization

Companies are under pressure to be in control of their assets but at the same time they must operate as efficiently as possible. This means that they aim to implement “good-enough security” but need to be able to justify their security investment plans. Currently companies achieve this by means of checklist-based security assessments, but these methods are a way to achieve consensus without being able to provide justifications of countermeasures in terms of business goals. But such justifications are needed to operate securely and effectively in networked businesses. In this paper, we first compare a Risk-Based Requirements Prioritization method (RiskREP) with some requirements engineering and risk assessment methods based on their requirements elicitation and prioritization properties. RiskREP extends misuse case-based requirements engineering methods with IT architecture-based risk assessment and countermeasure definition and prioritization. Then, we present how RiskREP prioritizes countermeasures by linking business goals to countermeasure specification. Prioritizing countermeasures based on business goals is especially important to provide the stakeholders with structured arguments for choosing a set of countermeasures to implement. We illustrate RiskREP and how it prioritizes the countermeasures it elicits by an application to an action case

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

Expert Elicitation for Reliable System Design

This paper reviews the role of expert judgement to support reliability assessments within the systems engineering design process. Generic design processes are described to give the context and a discussion is given about the nature of the reliability assessments required in the different systems engineering phases. It is argued that, as far as meeting reliability requirements is concerned, the whole design process is more akin to a statistical control process than to a straightforward statistical problem of assessing an unknown distribution. This leads to features of the expert judgement problem in the design context which are substantially different from those seen, for example, in risk assessment. In particular, the role of experts in problem structuring and in developing failure mitigation options is much more prominent, and there is a need to take into account the reliability potential for future mitigation measures downstream in the system life cycle. An overview is given of the stakeholders typically involved in large scale systems engineering design projects, and this is used to argue the need for methods that expose potential judgemental biases in order to generate analyses that can be said to provide rational consensus about uncertainties. Finally, a number of key points are developed with the aim of moving toward a framework that provides a holistic method for tracking reliability assessment through the design process.Comment: This paper commented in: [arXiv:0708.0285], [arXiv:0708.0287], [arXiv:0708.0288]. Rejoinder in [arXiv:0708.0293]. Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000510 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering: A Design for a Global Family of Surveys and First Results from Germany

For many years, we have observed industry struggling in defining a high quality requirements engineering (RE) and researchers trying to understand industrial expectations and problems. Although we are investigating the discipline with a plethora of empirical studies, they still do not allow for empirical generalisations. To lay an empirical and externally valid foundation about the state of the practice in RE, we aim at a series of open and reproducible surveys that allow us to steer future research in a problem-driven manner. We designed a globally distributed family of surveys in joint collaborations with different researchers and completed the first run in Germany. The instrument is based on a theory in the form of a set of hypotheses inferred from our experiences and available studies. We test each hypothesis in our theory and identify further candidates to extend the theory by correlation and Grounded Theory analysis. In this article, we report on the design of the family of surveys, its underlying theory, and the full results obtained from Germany with participants from 58 companies. The results reveal, for example, a tendency to improve RE via internally defined qualitative methods rather than relying on normative approaches like CMMI. We also discovered various RE problems that are statistically significant in practice. For instance, we could corroborate communication flaws or moving targets as problems in practice. Our results are not yet fully representative but already give first insights into current practices and problems in RE, and they allow us to draw lessons learnt for future replications. Our results obtained from this first run in Germany make us confident that the survey design and instrument are well-suited to be replicated and, thereby, to create a generalisable empirical basis of RE in practice