Requirements Engineering

Requirements Engineering (RE) aims to ensure that systems meet the needs of their stakeholders including users, sponsors, and customers. Often consid- ered as one of the earliest activities in software engineering, it has developed into a set of activities that touch almost every step of the software development process. In this chapter, we reflect on how the need for RE was first recognised and how its foundational concepts were developed. We present the seminal papers on four main activities of the RE process, namely (i) elicitation, (ii) modelling & analysis, (iii) as- surance, and (iv) management & evolution. We also discuss some current research challenges in the area, including security requirements engineering as well as RE for mobile and ubiquitous computing. Finally, we identify some open challenges and research gaps that require further exploration

‘It's Just about the Crime, Not the Victim’: Critical Insights from Australian Service Providers Working with People Who Have Been Trafficked

Published online: 29 Nov 2018Human trafficking is a global public health issue, prevalent in Australia. Our study aimed to gain in-depth understanding of human trafficking and related service provision from a range of sectors, from the perspective of service providers. Adopting a qualitative descriptive approach, in-depth semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 13 service providers from a range of organisations across three Australian states. Service providers emphasised the challenges posed by Australia's predominately criminal justice approach to trafficking, in both policy and service provision, with some suggesting the current process is re-traumatising. Results support refocusing policy and services away from a criminal justice response to a more comprehensive and holistic response that includes greater recognition of the social determinants of health and the provision of tailored services. This requires increased collaboration between service providers, some of whom have very different agendas. The findings provide support for recommendations with the Australian government inquiry into modern-day slavery and therefore have important implications for policy and health services nationally to become more holistic in responding to human trafficking.Emma George, George Tsourtos and Darlene McNaughto

The Modern Career of the Oldest Profession and the Social Embeddedness of Metaphors

Metaphors are elementary particles of meaningfulness, serving as cognitive resources for framing social problems or social movement narratives. This article presents a diachronic analysis of a metaphor synthesizing insights from cultural sociology and conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), an interdisciplinary neuroscientific program with robust empirical findings for how meanings change over time. I track the diffusion of ‘the most ancient’ metaphor for prostitution through publications on both sides of the Atlantic from its coinage by Rudyard Kipling in 1888. I explain the puzzle of its persistent polysemy by its embeddedness in three discursive communities: occupational professionals; social movements demanding state action against white slavery; and journalists, writers and cultured readers. These competing uses explain the paradox of how a metaphor about prostitution’s timelessness became a convention at the very movement that prostitution’s abolition seemed possible. While this single metaphor was used to express multiple opinions about prostitution’s inevitability, it shored up the ontological status of prostitution, a concept that contemporary researchers still struggle to unpack or displace. The diachronic analysis by which cultural categories are juxtaposed and reified is one of the insights of CMT for social cognition, with implications for sociological analysis of narratives, tropes and discourses