REAIMS Project Publications

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Abstract
This paper introduces an approach to multi-perspective requirements engineering (PREview) which has been designed for industrial use and discusses our practical experience in applying PREview. We have developed a flexible model of viewpoints and, using examples from an industrial application, show how this can be used to organise system requirements derived from radically different sources. We show how 'concerns', which are key business drivers of the requirements elicitation process, may be used to elicit and validate system requirements. They are decomposed into questions which must be answered by system stakeholders. We briefly describe the process of using PREview which has been designed to allow incremental requirements elicitation. Finally, we discuss some practical considerations which emerged when the approach was applied in industry.

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Abstract
Requirements Engineering (RE) is an inherently social process, involving the contribution of individuals working in an organizational context. Furthermore, failures in the RE process will potentially lead to systematic failures in the products that are produced as a result. Consequently, the RE process for dependable systems development should itself be considered as a dependable process, and therefore subject to greater scrutiny for vulnerabilities to error. Research on human error has typically focused on the work of individual actors from a cognitive perspective. This paper presents a survey which broadens the view on what contributes to human error by also examining work from the social and organizational literature. This review was conducted to inform efforts to improve the systems development process for dependable systems, and in particular their requirements engineering process.

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Abstract
Current process improvement and maturity models pay little attention to requirements engineering. Typically, requirements engineering is considered to be a single activity in the overall development process. Even where this is not strictly the case, the requirements activities are not elaborated in sufficient detail to permit the derivation of an improvement plan. This is unfortunate because requirements engineering is increasingly recognised as a problem. Despite the regular improvement of techniques for eliciting, analysing, validating and managing requirements, even otherwise mature organisations repeatedly experience requirements problems. This paper describes a good practice-based approach to requirements engineering process improvement which aims to fill the gap left by existing process improvement methods. This distils practical information from over 60 requirements practices and provides a framework to help organisations identify their problem areas and deploy the practices most appropriate to their needs.

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Abstract
The paper includes a survey and discussion of viewpoint-oriented approaches to requirements engineering and a presentation of new work in this area which has been designed with practical application in mind. We describe the benefits of viewpoint-oriented requirements engineering and describe the strengths and weaknesses of a number of viewpoint-oriented methods. We discuss the practical problems of introducing viewpoint-oriented requirements engineering into industrial software engineering practice and why these have prevented the widespread use of existing approaches.

We then introduce a new model of viewpoints called Preview. Preview viewpoints are flexible, generic entities which can be used in different ways and in different application domains. We describe the novel characteristics of the Preview viewpoints model and the associated processes of requirements discovery, analysis and negotiation. Finally, we discuss how well this approach addresses some outstanding problems in requirements engineering (RE) and the practical industrial problems of introducing new requirements engineering methods.

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Abstract
Work in the field of human error has typically focused on operators of safety-critical equipment, such as nuclear power plant controllers, and of the design of the human-machine interfaces in such settings. Limited consideration has been given to wider system issues. Similarly, researchers and practitioners in the field of Dependable Systems are concerned with the design of computer-based systems which are intended to be operated in situations where the consequences of failure are potentially catastrophic. For example, the failure of a safety-critical system may cause great harm to people, property, or the environment. The work reported on in this paper is motivated by the need to 'push back' these concerns with the operation and design of dependable systems to the process by which they are developed.

(extended abstract only)

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Abstract
In the development of systems that have to be dependable, weaknesses in the requirements engineering (RE) process are highly undesirable. Such weaknesses may either introduce undetected system weaknesses, or otherwise significant costs may arise in their correction later in the development process. Typically, the RE process contains a number of individual and group activities and thus is particularly subject to weaknesses arising from human factors. Our work has concerned the development of PERE (Process Evaluation in Requirements Engineering), which is a structured method for analysing processes for weaknesses and proposing process improvements against them. PERE combines two complementary viewpoints within its process evaluation approach. Firstly, a classical engineering analysis is used for process modelling and generic process weakness identification. This initial analysis is fed into the second analysis phase, in which those process components that are primarily composed of human activity, their interconnections and organisational context are subject to a systematic human factors analysis. In this paper we briefly describe PERE and provide examples of the application experience to date.

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Abstract
This paper discusses the need for a systematic framework which can be used to analyse software processes and derive process models. We propose the idea of process viewpoints which have associated process models and which incorporate questions about process and potential process improvement. The questions associated with each process viewpoint are derived from organisational concerns which must be explicitly identified. This work has been carried out in the context of a project which is investigating approaches to requirements engineering process improvement.

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