Anne Persson

Requirements engineering challenges in market-driven software development - An interview study with practitioners

Requirements engineering for market-driven software development entails special challenges. This paper presents results from an empirical study that investigates these challenges, taking a qualitative approach using interviews with fourteen employees at eight software companies and a focus group meeting with practitioners. The objective of the study is to increase the understanding of the area of market-driven requirements engineering and provide suggestions for future research by describing encountered challenges. A number of challenging issues were found, including bridging communication gaps between marketing and development, selecting the right level of process support, basing the release plan on uncertain estimates, and managing the constant flow of requirements.

Participative enterprise modeling: experiences and recommendations

The objective of this paper is to report a set of experiences of applying participative enterprise modeling in different organizational contexts. While the authors have successfully applied the approach in many organizations, the paper primarily concentrates on three cases. On the basis of these experiences the paper presents a set of generic principles for applying participative enterprise modeling.

Requirements Interdependencies: State of the Art and Future Challenges

It is well acknowledged in practice as well as in research that requirements are related to each other and that these relationships affect software development work in various ways. This chapter addresses requirements interdependencies, starting from a traceability perspective. The focus of the chapter is on giving an overview of requirements interdependency research and on synthesizing this into a model of fundamental interdependency types and a research agenda for the area. Furthermore, a description of how knowledge about requirements interdependencies can facilitate various activities within software engineering is provided. The main challenges for the future are to understand the nature of requirements interdependencies and to develop approaches that enable to identify, describe and effectively deal with them in the software development process.

Purpose driven competency planning for enterprise modeling projects

Much of the success of projects using Enterprise Modeling (EM) depends more on the quality of the process of modeling rather than on the method used. One important influence on the quality of the modeling process is the competency level of the experts responsible for the EM approach. Each EM project is, however, specific depending on the purpose of modeling, such as developing the business, ensuring the quality of business operations, and using EM as a problem solving tool. The objective of this paper is to discuss the core competency needs for the EM practitioner and to relate those needs to different purposes of EM.

Portraying the practice of decision-making in requirements engineering: a case of large scale bespoke development

Complex decision-making is a prominent aspect of requirements engineering (RE) and the need for improved decision support for RE decision-makers has been identified by a number of authors in the research literature. A first step toward better decision support in requirements engineering is to understand multifaceted decision situations of decision-makers. In this paper, the focus is on RE decision-making in large scale bespoke development. The decision situation of RE decision-makers on a subsystem level has been studied at a systems engineering company and is depicted in this paper. These situations are described in terms of, e.g., RE decision matters, RE decision-making activities, and RE decision processes. Factors that affect RE decision-makers are also identified.

Why Enterprise Modelling? An Explorative Study into Current Practice

This paper presents an explorative study, which investigates the intentions behind current use of Enterprise Modelling (EM) in organisations. The intentions fall into two main categories: developing the business and ensuring the quality of the business. The results indicate that current methods are useful for these purposes.

Evaluating a Pattern Approach as an Aid for the Development of Organisational Knowledge: An Empirical Study

Patterns are a powerful paradigm that has emerged in recent years as a mechanism that can help towards the consolidation and dissemination of design experiences. In the context of the European research project ELEKTRA we developed a pattern approach for capturing best business practices of change management in the electricity sector. In this paper we briefly present this approach and concentrate on the issue of validating the pattern approach through evaluation of its different features. In particular, we define three constituent features, namely the knowledge contained in patterns, the language used to construct patterns and the method for developing the patterns. For each of these features we define an evaluation hypothesis and then test this hypothesis against a set of criteria and metrics. The experiments conducted and the results are presented in summary.

An Explorative Study into the Influence of Business Goals on the Practical Use of Enterprise Modelling Methods and Tools

An explorative study was carried out to investigate the intentions behind the use of Enterprise Modelling (EM) in organisations and to assess the implications of those intentions for EM tool support and participative EM. Some important conclusions are: 1) Participative EM should only be applied in consensus oriented organisational cultures and if properly applied it is a very strong way of committing stakeholders to business decisions, 2) The preparation of EM activities is critical and complex, meaning that it is not a task for novices, 3) Modelling experts prefer flexible and tools that give them methodological freedom, graphical power and reporting facilities, and 4) Future EM tools will need to cater for integration of methods.

Anti-Patterns as a Means of Focusing on Critical Quality Aspects in Enterprise Modeling

Enterprise Modeling (EM) is used for a wide range of purposes such as developing business strategies, business process restructuring, business process orientation and standardization, eliciting information system requirements, capturing best practices, etc. A common challenge impeding the value and impact of EM is insufficient model quality. Despite substantial attention from both researchers and commercial vendors of methods the current situation in practice with respect to the quality of models produced is not satisfactory. Many modeling projects produce bad models that are essentially useless. The objective of this paper is to introduce a format, anti-patterns, for documenting critical don’ts in EM and to demonstrate the potential of the format by using it to report a set of common and reoccurring pitfalls of real life EM projects. We use the format of anti-pattern for capturing the bad solutions to reoccurring problems and then explain what led to choosing the bad solution. The anti-patterns in this paper address three main aspects of EM – the modeling product, the modeling process, and the modeling tool support.

An Intentional Perspective on Enterprise Modeling

Enterprise Modeling (EM) has two main purposes: (1) Developing the business, which entails developing business vision, strategies, redesigning the way the business operates, developing the supporting information systems, etc., and (2) ensuring the quality of the business where the focus is on sharing the knowledge about the business, its vision and the way it operates, and ensuring the acceptance of business decisions through committing the stakeholders to the decisions made. In addition, EM has also shown to be useful as a general tool for articulating, discussing, and solving organizational problems. Based on a number of case studies, interviews and observations this chapter defines what is required from EM when adopted for these purposes and intentions respectively. More precisely, it addresses the following types of requirements: documents and models required as input, models that should be developed, requirements on the modeling language, requirements on the modeling process, tool requirements and model quality requirements. The defined requirements are then discussed taking a specific EM method, Enterprise Knowledge Development (EKD) as example.