Donald C. Gause

Experiential learning approach for requirements engineering education

The use of requirements engineering (RE) in industry is hampered by a poor understanding of its practices and their benefits. Teaching RE at the university level is therefore an important endeavor. Shortly before students become engineers and enter the workforce, this education could ideally be provided as an integrated part of developing the requisite business skills for understanding RE. Because much social wisdom is packed into RE methods, it is unrealistic to expect students with little organizational experience to understand and appreciate this body of knowledge; hence, the necessity of an experiential approach. The course described in this paper uses an active, affective, experiential pedagogy giving students the opportunity to experience a simulated work environment that demonstrates the social/design–problem complexities and richness of a development organization in the throes of creating a new product. Emotional and technical debriefing is conducted after each meaningful experience so that students and faculty, alike can better understand the professional relevancies of what they have just experienced. This includes an examination of the many forces encountered in industrial settings but not normally discussed in academic settings. The course uses a low-tech social simulation, rather than software simulation, so that students learn through interaction with real people, and are therefore confronted with the complexity of true social relationships.

Requirements Engineering Education in the 21st Century, An Experiential Learning Approach

RE use in industry is hampered by a poor understanding of RE practices and their benefits. Teaching RE at the university level is therefore an important endeavor. This education can ideally be provided at the university level as an integrated part of developing the requisite RE and software engineering technical skills, shortly before students become engineers and enter the workforce. However, much social wisdom is packed into RE methods. It is unrealistic to expect students with little organizational experience to understand this body of knowledge. The course described in this paper uses an active, affective, experiential pedagogy giving students the opportunity of experiencing a simulated work environment that demonstrates the social/design-problem complexities and richness of a development organization in the throws of creating a new product. Emotional and technical debriefing is conducted after each meaningful experience so that students and faculty, alike, can better understand the professional relevancies of what they have just experienced. This includes an examination of the many forces experienced in industrial settings but not normally discussed in academic settings. The course uses a low-tech social simulation rather than software simulation so that students learn through interaction with real people and therefore are confronted with the complexity of true social relationships.

HYBRID NEWTON-RAPHSON GENETIC ALGORITHM FOR THE TRAVELING SALESMAN PROBLEM

This paper presents a novel genetic algorithm to solve the traveling salesman problem. The proposed method combines the Newton-Raphson numerical method with an inversion genetic algorithm; the method is called inversion with embedded Newton-Raphson Search. Different benchmark problems, including 10-, 30-, 50-, 75-, 105-, and 318-city topologies, are used to evaluate the approach. The best-known solutions have been produced by this hybrid genetic algorithm. In this paper we also report other results, such as the average tour distance, distribution of the results, and average number of generations. The proposed approach has been shown to outperform other genetic operators. An analysis based on the survival rate of the o-schemata and Hollands fundamental theory is included.

The challenge of release planning

Size and complexity of todays software products are continuously growing. This has made it increasingly difficult to decide which features shall be implemented in a products next version. Consequently, release planning, the process of planning for the next release of an evolving product has been recognized as a wicked problem. Existing studies on wicked problems suggest that it would be too simple to deal with them with intelligence gathering, linear thinking and rational decision making. Yet, it appears that this is precisely how many companies are currently trying to plan their forthcoming product releases. Although the characteristics of release planning challenges are visible and documented in the literature, is this challenge really seen? This paper reviews existing release planning practices introduced in the literature in order to understand the underlying assumptions they have been built on. The identified assumptions are then compared with reported release planning characteristics. As a result, the paper identifies the gap between the problem characteristics and the current solutions, and outlines conditions for more adequate release planning approaches to deal with release planning as complex wicked problems.

Empirical validation of the Classic Change Curve on a software technology change project

Context: New processes, tools, and practices are being introduced into software companies at an increasing rate. With each new advance in technology, software managers need to consider not only whether it is time to change the technologies currently used, but also whether an evolutionary change is sufficient or a revolutionary change is required. Objective: In this paper, we approach this dilemma from the organizational and technology research points of view to see whether they can help software companies in initiating and managing technology change. In particular, we explore the fit of the technology S-curve, the Classic Change Curve, and a technological change framework to a software technology change project and examine the insights that such frameworks can bring. Method: The descriptive case study described in this paper summarizes a software technology change project in which a 30-year old legacy information system running on a mainframe was replaced by a network server system at the same time as the individual-centric development practices were replaced with organization-centric ones. The study is based on a review of the companys annual reports, in conjunction with other archival documents, five interviews and collaboration with a key stakeholder in the company. Results: Analyses of the collected data suggest that software technology change follows the general change research findings as characterized by the technology S-curve and the Classic Change Curve. Further, that such frameworks present critical questions for management to address when embarking on and then running such projects. Conclusions: We describe how understanding why a software technology change project is started, the way in which it unfolds, and how different factors affect it, are essential tools for project leaders in preparing for change projects and for keeping them under control. Moreover, we show how it is equally important to understand how software technology change can work as a catalyst in revitalizing a stagnated organization, facilitating other changes and thereby helping an organization to redefine its role in the marketplace.

How Internationalization of a Product Changes Requirements Engineering Activities: An Exploratory Study

This paper explores the Requirement Engineering (RE) activities in two software product development organizations. Both companies have in recent years extended their product offering outside of their home market. In this paper, we wish to answer what RErelated challenges companies have faced in their journey of introducing their software products in new market areas and what have the companies done in their response to their new RE-related challenges. We believe that the results of this paper are important for practitioners and researchers alike. While increasing the academic understanding on the role of internationalization in market-driven requirements engineering, the paper also helps practitioners to anticipate some of the challenges that they may meet in their internationalization efforts. We have discovered that there may be inconsistencies between the nature of the challenges companies are facing and the strategies companies have taken to respond to the challenges. In addition, many of our findings are human interaction related indicating that the social aspects may still be an undervalued topic in RE research.

Toward a Service Management Quality Model

[Context and motivation] Service Management has been steadily gaining in importance in many organizations and is becoming a major force of change in IT departments. ITIL, one of the main service management frameworks, defines the value of a service for its customers as the sum of the service utilities and service warranties but provides no specific rules for defining them. [Question/problem] Companies, IT departments and their consultants face difficulties defining utilities and warranties, as well as identifying their value for customers. [Principal ideas/results] We propose a general framework for understanding service requirements and for analyzing the quality of a service. The framework is based on General Systems Thinking. We define service utilities as norms created by the service for a given stakeholder. Service warranties then protect the stakeholder from variations of these norms as a result of threats. Value is created when the norms are maintained within the tolerance range of the stakeholder. Risk is defined as the possibility of detrimental consequences for a stakeholder if the norm is pushed outside its tolerance range. [Contribution] We believe that this work has the potential to advance theory and practice of service management in both academia and industry, and to reduce the risk of overlooking important service properties when defining service requirements.

Making Sense of Product Requirements

This paper takes a historical perspective to more than 40 years of software development within a company that is delivering its products to a diverse set of customers throughout the world. By examining the company’s past, we wish to find origins and potential remedies for the challenges that many companies presently face in determining just which, of many, features shall be implemented to forthcoming versions of their software products. We have concluded that the product-related design problems that once were manageable with rational thinking have gradually evolved into problems that have multiple and conflicting interpretations, different value orientations, unclear goals, contradictions and paradoxes. These problems occur due to the demands imposed by larger and much more diverse sets of critical stakeholders drawn from the new global business environment with its multi-cultural needs and greater numbers of highly domain-skilled, computer naïve users. For such problems sense making rather than decision making has begun to be the central organizational issue.

Modeling Service-Level Requirements: A Constancy Perspective

IT service requirements offer a seemingly classic Requirements Engineering (RE) problem. But, when attempting to solve it with RE methods, we are faced with difficulties. RE methods encourage us to identify the functional and non-functional requirements of a service. Industrial service-management frameworks, however, use a different vocabulary. ITIL, one of the most prominent service-management frameworks, refers to service utilities and service warranties. In this paper, we propose a method for modeling warranties as a function of the service constancy expected by stakeholders and the threats to this constancy. We identify four kinds of warranties: express, implied, tacit and pending. We thereby seek to bridge the gap between service-management frameworks and RE methods and to improve the practice of service management in organizations.

An approach for cross-discipline requirements engineering process patterns

This paper describes a method and a sample application of an approach to cross-discipline requirements engineering process patterns. The patterns concept has been applied to the cross-discipline design process domain to include requirements definition, analysis, and validation in contrast to previous efforts in requirements product pattern and discipline-specific process patterns. A method, template, and example process pattern are described. Ways to apply this method to extend the requirement exploration framework of Gause and Weinberg (1989) are proposed for generic design problems in any discipline to include a domain-specific process composition approach. A proposed list of patterns based on this framework is provided. A follow on paper will detail cross-discipline analysis results and pattern identification to include case study analysis from an exemplar set of successful and failed projects and validation using a final case study.