Konstantinos Zachos

Requirements Engineering as Creative Problem Solving: A Research Agenda for Idea Finding

This vision paper frames requirements engineering as a creative problem solving process. Its purpose is to enable requirements researchers and practitioners to recruit relevant theories, models, techniques and tools from creative problem solving to understand and support requirements processes more effectively. It uses 4 drivers to motivate the case for requirements engineering as a creative problem solving process. It then maps established requirements activities onto one of the longest-established creative problem solving processes, and uses these mappings to locate opportunities for the application of creative problem solving in requirements engineering. The second half of the paper describes selected creativity theories, techniques, software tools and training that can be adopted to improve requirements engineering research and practice. The focus is on support for problem and idea finding – two creative problem solving processes that our investigation revealed are poorly supported in requirements engineering. The paper ends with a research agenda to incorporate creative processes, techniques, training and tools in requirements projects.

Discovering web services to specify more complete system requirements

Service-centric systems pose new challenges and opportunities for requirements processes and techniques. This paper reports new techniques developed by the EU-funded SeCSE Integrated Project that enable service discovery during early requirements processes and exploit discovered services to enhance requirements specifications. The paper describes the algorithm for discovering services from requirements expressed using structured natural language, and demonstrates it using an automotive example. The paper also reports a first evaluation of the utility of the environment that implements this algorithm when improving the specification of requirements with retrieved services.

Computing technologies for reflective, creative care of people with dementia

Mobile apps manage data on individual residents to help carers deliver more person-centered care.

Discovering Web Services to Improve Requirements Specifications: Does It Help?

Service-centric systems pose new opportunities for when engineering requirements. This paper reports an evaluation of software tools with which to exploit discovered services to improve the completeness of requirements specifications. Although these tools had been evaluated previously in facilitated industrial workshops, industrial users had not used the tools directly. In this paper we report 2 industrial uses and evaluations in which experienced analysts used the tools directly on 2 real-world requirements projects. Results reveal that analysts used the tools to retrieve web services that could implement specified requirements, but analysts were less able to improve these requirements in light of the retrieved services. Results have implications for iterative service discovery processes and service discovery algorithms.

ART-SCENE: enhancing scenario walkthroughs with multi-media scenarios

ART-SCENE supports the systematic generation and walkthrough of scenarios that has been applied to specify 2 major air traffic management systems. Features include: (1) automatic generation of scenarios from use cases, (2) automatic generation of alternative courses, and (3) guided scenario walkthroughs.

A software app to support creativity in dementia care

This paper reports a new mobile software app to support creative thinking by carers for people with dementia. The design of the app was informed by both pre-studies that demonstrated the potential of investigating challenging behaviors in non-care domains to improve person-centered care, and a model of creative problem solving adapted to dementia care. The resulting app implements different versions of the Other Worlds creativity technique to generate then reflect on ideas to improve resident care. An evaluation of the app in one residential home revealed that carers were able to use the app as described in the model, and deliver novel care to one resident in the home.

Discovering remote software services that satisfy requirements: patterns for query reformulation

Developing service-centric applications will require developers to discover candidate services during requirements processes. However such discovery is challenging due to the ontological mismatch between requirement and service descriptions. We propose patterns to re-express requirements-based service queries using classes of solution service, to increase the likelihood of discovering relevant services from service registries. We report a prototype pattern language developed for service-based vehicle fleet management, and demonstrate its use with an example.

Towards a framework for describing cloud service characteristics for use by chief information officers

This paper reports the first steps of work undertaken by a consortium of commercial and academic institutions to describe and share cloud service characteristics for use by consumer organizations, and in particular by the chief information officers of these organizations to manage their portfolios of cloud services. It describes a model of cloud service characteristics, focusing on qualities associated with the service and the important associations between service characteristics necessary to generate claims about the goodness or otherwise of a service. It presents several examples of measures, metrics and indicators specified to describe different types of cloud service characteristic included in the model. The paper ends with a description of future work, to make cloud service data and information available to a wider community of service consumers and organizations.

Does Service Discovery Enhance Requirements Specification? A Preliminary Empirical Investigation

Service-centric systems pose new challenges and opportunities for requirements processes and techniques. This paper describes new techniques developed by the EU-funded SeCSE Integrated Project that enable service discovery during early requirements processes and exploit discovered services to enhance requirements specifications, and reports 2 preliminary evaluations of software tools by our industrial partners that implement SeCSEs processes and techniques. The first evaluation investigated the usability and functionality of UCaRE, a web-based tool for specifying requirements prior to discovering services. The second evaluation investigated the utility and usability of UCaRE combined with EDDiE, the service discovery engine, during a requirements discovery workshop. Results from both evaluations inform the design of the second versions of SeCSEs processes, techniques and tools.

Using mobile devices and apps to support reflective learning about older people with dementia

There has been little research to develop computing technologies to support the care of people with dementia, in spite of the growing challenges that the condition poses for society. To design such technologies, an existing model of computer-support reflective learning was instantiated with findings from a pre-design study in one residential home. The result was a mobile device running an adapted enterprise social media app to support person-centred care. Evaluations of the device and app in two residential homes revealed that use of the app both motivated and increased different styles of care note recording, but little reflective learning was identified or reported. The results suggest the need for more comprehensive and flexible computer-based support for reflective learning about residents in their care – and new designs of this more comprehensive support are also introduced.