Jawed I. A. Siddiqi

Requirements Engineering and Technology Transfer: Obstacles, Incentives and Improvement Agenda

For many years, research results in requirements engineering (RE) have been developed without much interaction with, or impact on, industrial practice. Why is it so difficult to introduce RE research results into mainstream RE practice? This paper attempts to provide answers to this question by describing obstacles that researchers and practitioners have encountered when they attempted technology transfer. In addition, major incentives for using RE methods are discussed, along with ideas for improving current RE practice. The paper summarises, clarifies and extends the results of two panel discussions, one at the Twelfth Conference on Advanced information Systems Engineering (CAiSE’00) and the other at the Fourth IEEE Conference on Requirements Engineering (ICRE’00).

Formal Methods: State of the Art and New Directions

The last decade has witnessed a modest but sustained increase in researching and applying formal methods. A number of well cited success stories are now available and provide strong evidence that formal methods can be effective and deployed in industrial-scale applications. Through fundamental contributions from leading researchers, this book provides further evidence of the use of formal methods in the areas of requirements, design, modelling and implementation, verification and validation. The self-contained chapters are views from experts in these areas, providing readers with rich background information and a diverse breadth of specialist material. This authoritative collection of views provides a snapshot of the field and will be of considerable interest to researchers and professionals seeking a perspective on fundamental underpinnings of formal methods and current hot topics in the field. The following website www.fmsand.info is associated with the book.

The classification of requirements engineering methods

A classification of requirements engineering methods based on the social assumptions made about organizations is presented. The scheme, based on a taxonomy of social theories after J. Lyotard (1984), provides a set of categories corresponding to metanarratives used within requirements engineering. A short description of each metanarrative is provided in terms of the assumptions made about the nature of society and the expected role of the requirements engineer. A decision aid for practitioners is included in the form of a table that classifies a representative sample of requirements engineering methods.<<ETX>>

Secure ICT Services for Mobile and Wireless Communications: A Federated Global Identity Management Framework

The paper reports on the current research activities related to the delivery of a federated global identity management framework for provisioning secure ICT services; this represents a significant step towards the development of global federated security services for the Web, Grid and particularly for future Mobile and Wireless communication (ICT platforms). The overall aim of the research is to provide seamless traversal to access distributed resources in the heterogeneous Web, Grid, and particularly Mobile and Wireless spaces. Furthermore, in order to consider the value and usefulness of the Trust-ME framework its strategic impact is assessed in terms of its proposed application to a real world integrated scenarios in three distinct domains of telecommunications, surveillance and virtual gaming.

Towards a system for the construction, clarification, discovery and formalisation of requirements

Requirements engineering is fraught with possibilities for misunderstanding and mistakes and it is well known that the earlier such errors occur in the lifecycle the more costly the consequences. Formal specifications provide from a developers perspective a clear, concise and unambiguous statement of the system requirements. Prototyping enables effective user participation in the validation of requirements The authors report on work towards a system that judiciously combines the strengths of formal specification and prototyping to assist in the construction, negotiation, clarification, discovery and formalisation of requirements that could make the crucial activity of requirements engineering less problematic.<<ETX>>

Adaptive information retrieval system via modelling user behaviour

There has been an exponential growth in the volume and variety of information available on the Internet, similarly there has been a significant demand from users’ for accurate information that matches their interests, however, the two are often incompatible because of the effectiveness of retrieving the exact information the user requires. This paper addresses this problem with an adaptive agent-based modelling approach that relies on evolutionary user-modelling. The proposed information retrieval system learns user needs from user-provided relevance feedback. It is proposed that retrieval effectiveness can be improved by applying computational intelligence techniques for modelling information needs, through interactive reinforcement learning. The method combines qualitative (subjective) user relevance feedback with quantitative (algorithmic) measures of the relevance of retrieved documents. An adaptive information retrieval system is developed whose retrieval effectiveness is evaluated using traditional precision and recall.

A study of encrypted, tunneling models in virtual private networks

The concept of virtual private networks offers a simple and cheap alternative to dedicated secure networks in corporate networks and Internet environments. The choice, however, of authentication and encryption techniques and protocols affect issues such as data throughput and performance throughout the network. This paper looks into two virtual private network models within a corporate network. Two operating system platforms are implemented in this investigation; Novell Netware and Windows 2000. Performance of the two arrangements is, subsequently, analyzed and evaluated.

Formal comparisons of program modification

This work adopts a psychologically motivated evaluative framework in the comparison of a visual and a textual programming language. The framework used is a formal interpretation of cognitive dimensions, focusing upon the notion of notation viscosity. In contrast to many studies of visual languages, we do not primarily focus upon programs, but on program modification. Hence, a program (visual or textual) is viewed as an artifact which is manipulated by programmers. Thus in general the question addressed is one of how do visual and textual languages differ in terms of the artifact which programmers interactively manipulate. More specifically, we are able to demonstrate the use of an evaluative framework in the comparative assessment of visual and textual programming languages.

Validating and evolving software requirements in a systematic framework

The concern is with validation and evolution of software requirements based on the notion of executable specifications. A fundamental premise of this approach is that it is possible to use executable specification descriptions and conventional implementation descriptions interchangeably. This allows a prototype system to be transformed into a production quality system by incrementally replacing specifications with implementations which conform to them.<<ETX>>

Use of a specification construction and animation tool to teach formal methods

ZAL (Z Animation in LISP) is a package which allows a Z specification to be incrementally designed and validated in an interactive environment built on Common LISP. A Z specification is transformed into an equivalent ZAL program which can be executed in order to demonstrate the functionality of the intended implementation. ZED is a full screen editor and syntax analyser for Z. Using these two tools as an integrated package encourages and facilitates an exploratory approach to formal specification which reflects the way in which many users of Z (particularly beginners) prefer to approach the specification task. The package has also been used to support the teaching of students following courses in discrete mathematics, formal specification and software development.<<ETX>>