Date: Thu, 2 Jun 94 12:22:37 BST X-Sender: acwf@gummo.doc.ic.ac.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 To: re-world@doc.ic.ac.uk From: acwf@doc.ic.ac.uk (Anthony Finkelstein) Subject: REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER (27) ****************REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER******************** No. 27. Contents 1. Requirements Engineering at ICSE 16 [ftp] (Anthony Finkelstein) 2. Toasters (Mark Ryan) 3. Virtual World Design (Kathryn Best) 4. MASCOTS '95 (Youcef Atamna) If you have questions about particular items appearing in the newsletter - send them to the originators. If you wish to contribute send your material to: re-list@doc.ic.ac.uk (will be moderated). Subscription or Removal requests should be sent to: re-request@doc.ic.ac.uk Back issues can be obtained via anonymous ftp from ftp-host: dse.doc.ic.ac.uk (IP number: 146.169.2.20). Directory: requirements. Files are called renl1, renl2, etc. If you cannot use ftp then you can get any back issues using email. Send email containing the following to ftpmail@doc.ic.ac.uk open dse.doc.ic.ac.uk cd requirements get quit The Requirements Engineering Newsletter and its archive is also accessible through WWW. The URL is: http://web.doc.ic.ac.uk/req-eng/index.html You may wish to link any Internet software engineering information resource you maintain to this and/or notify the manager of your local Web server by passing this message on to them. If you wish your requirements or software engineering ftp archive to be linked to the RE Newsletter archive please inform me. If you are unfamiliar with WWW you may wish to obtain a copy of the Mosaic public domain internet browser which is available for X-Windows, Macintosh or Microsoft Windows. The RE Newsletter can be conveniently accessed through the Imperial College, Department of Computing, United Kingdom, WWW Home Page (http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/). Requirements Engineering Newsletter is published solely as an educational service. Copyright (c) 1994, Anthony Finkelstein; All Rights Reserved. ********************************************************************** From: acwf@doc.ic.ac.uk (Anthony Finkelstein) Subject: Requirements Engineering at ICSE 16 [ftp] As many of you will know it has become customary at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) to present a "best paper" prize to a paper selected from the conference held 10 ICSEs before. In other words a paper that has stood the test of time. The winner of this prestigious prize at ICSE 16 (1994) was selected from ICSE 6 and was: Greenspan, S., Mylopoulos, J. and Borgida, A. "Capturing More World Knowledge in the Requirements Specification", Proc. 6th Int. Conf. on SE, Tokyo, 1982. Reprinted in Freeman, P., and Wasserman, A. (eds.) Tutorial on Software Design Techniques, IEEE Computer Society Press,1984. Also in R. Prieto-Diaz and G. Arango, Domain Analysis and Software Systems Modeling, IEEE Comp. Sci. Press, 1991. The authors gave an invited plenary talk to mark this award and a paper appears in the Proceedings of ICSE-16. The title, abstract and citation follow. On Formal Requirements Modeling Languages: RML Revisited Sol Greenspan, John Mylopoulos, Alex Borgida Research issues related to requirements modeling are introduced and discussed through a review of requirements modeling language RML, its peers and its successors from the time it was first proposed at the Sixth International Conference on Software Engineering to the present ICSEs later. We note that the central theme of Capturing More World Knowledge in the original RML proposal is becoming increasingly important in Requirements Engineering. The paper highlights key ideas and research issues that have driven RML and its peers, evaluates them retrospectively in the context of experience and more recent developments, and points out significant remaining problems and directions for requirements modeling research. Proc. 16th International Conference on Software Engineering, pp 135-148, IEEE Comp. Sci. Press, 1994. -------HOT ITEM------------------------------------------------------------- This important paper is available exclusively to readers of this newsletter as greenspan.ps via anonymous ftp from ftp-host: dse.doc.ic.ac.uk (IP number: 146.169.2.20). Directory: requirements. If you cannot use ftp send email containing the following to ftpmail@doc.ic.ac.uk open dse.doc.ic.ac.uk cd requirements get greenspan.ps quit The paper is also available through www by way of URL http://web.doc.ic.ac.uk/req-eng/index.html ********************************************************************** From: mdr@yoda.inesc.pt (Mark Ryan) Subject: Toasters (I am afraid the provenance of this item is unknown, as it has been forwarded without its headers.) Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?" One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype." The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years." "With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes." "The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs." "Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too." "We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message 'Booting UNIX v. 8.3' appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook." "Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386 with 8MB of memory, a 30MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!)." The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after. ********************************************************************** From: Kathryn Best Subject: Virtual World Design {Extracted by Moderator from the Design Computing Newsletter} THE IDIOTS' GUIDE TO VIRTUAL WORLD DESIGN by Kathryn Best Publisher: Little Star Press 323 Broadway, #306 Seattle WA 98102 USA ISBN 0-9641504-0-9 48pp The author is an architect by training and presently working in the field of virtual world design. The book is 48 pages and is heavily illustrated. The content is based on the author's experiences in developing an awareness of design-related issues as applied to virtual space, while at The Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HIT Lab) in Seattle. The Guide has proved to be successful as a basic introduction to the field, both for computer types who are unaware of the importance of design issues, and for design professionals who want to know how they can apply their skills to developing better virtual worlds. Review by Robert Jacobson (Worldesign, Seattle): Idiot's Guide is probably the first readable, intelligent discussion of design in virtual space....... Not only does it raise the questions of design that all world-builders will have to confront at one time or another, but the guide does it with insight and humor that invite the general reader to participate in the adventure..... The illustrations aptly enable the reader to appreciate the complexities of virtual world design -- and how many solutions are to be found in that oldest of spatial design professions, architecture. The witty interpretations of common problems in spatial design as they apply to virtual worlds demonstrate that _everyone_, all the time, is a virtual world builder in one's head. The future of the technology lies not with specialist magicians but rather with the enthusiastic artist and craftsperson living in each of us. Price: US$10.00, postpaid within the United States. Washingon residents please add $1.00 sales tax. International orders please add postage of US$2.00. Fully guaranteed. Full price, less postage, refunded if returned within 30 days. ********************************************************************** From: youcef@laas.fr (Youcef Atamna) Subject: MASCOTS '95 {Of particular relevance to work on non-functional requirements} C A L L F O R P A P E R S International Workshop on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS'95) Co-sponsored by the IEEE (Computer Society, TCCA, TCSIM) and Duke University In Cooperation with the ACM (SIGSIM, SIGARCH, SIGMETRICS), IFIP WG 7.3, and SCS January 18 -- 20, 1995 Durham, North Carolina, USA MASCOTS'95 is a workshop for researchers, practitioners, developers and experts with interests in systems design, modeling, analysis, simulation, and performance evaluation. Attendees will meet and discuss tools, technologies, and methodologies for studying the performance of computer and communications systems. Performance, robustness and reliability predictions of current and future computer and communication systems are both important and challenging. The repertoire of the contemporary system designer must include a wide spectrum of theoretical and pragmatic tools. This workshop provides a forum for researchers and practitioners to meet and discuss the spectrum of theory and application of performance technologies. Papers that deal with these themes, both methodological and specific case study-oriented, are solicited. We are especially interested in papers on innovative modeling and/or simulation techniques that are expected to survive the onslaught of technological advances and remain current for a reasonable period of time. The workshop will have prominent guest speakers, presentations of refereed papers, tool and poster presentations. Contributions to the program are invited in areas such as (but not limited to) the following: Advances in tools, techniques, and methodologies relating to: -- Performance models -- Discrete simulation -- Performance animation and visualization -- Trace collection and usage -- System tuning -- Application program tuning -- Numeric simulation and visualization techniques -- Analytic modeling -- Performability modeling -- Specification and validation techniques Application and Case Studies might relate to systems such as: -- Parallel and distributed systems -- Parallel and distributed applications -- Computer architecture -- Memory hierarchies and network memory systems -- Database systems -- Massively parallel and scalable systems -- Telecommunication/communication systems -- Application systems like DSP/AI applications, expert systems, vision and image processing systems, robotics and control, etc. ================================ AUTHOR INFORMATION All submissions will be blind reviewed. Put names, affiliations and addresses for correspondence (postal and electronic) of authors on a separate cover. Papers must not exceed 20 double-spaced pages (and will normally be limited to 6 typeset pages when they are published). Provide an abstract and 3-4 keywords. An author of each accepted paper is required to attend the meeting and to present the paper. A limited number of posters/short papers may also be admitted. For posters, an extended abstract of maximum 4 double-spaced pages must be submitted. Full-length papers and poster abstracts will appear in the proceedings. Send four copies of your papers, posters, to the Program Chair (Patrick Dowd) at the address given below. Tools accepted for presentation will be demonstrated on a computer system or shown on a video tape. All submissions on tools must contain the details of the necessary equipment. Send abstracts on tools to one of the Tools Fair Chairs. Brief descriptions of selected tools including pictures (max. 4 double-spaced page) will also appear in the proceedings. ================================ SCHEDULE July 15, 1994: Deadline for submissions of papers July 15, 1994: Deadline for tool proposals September 15, 1994: Notification of acceptance October 15, 1994: Deadline for camera-ready copy People interested in forming special sessions should contact the Program Chair (Patrick Dowd). ================================ GENERAL CHAIR Erol Gelenbe Electrical Engineering Department Duke University Durham, NC 27708-0291 Email: erol@egr.duke.edu Phone: +(1) 919-660-5442 Fax: +(1) 919-660-5293 PROGRAM CHAIR Patrick Dowd Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering State University of New York at Buffalo 201 Bell Hall Buffalo, NY 14260 USA Email: dowd@eng.buffalo.edu Phone: +(1) 716-645-2406 Fax: +(1) 716-645-3656 TOOLS FAIR CHAIRS Thomas Braunl Manu Thapar IPVR HP Research Labs. U Stuttgart, Breitwiesenstr. 20-22 1501 Page Mill Road D-7000 Stuttgart 80, Germany Palo Alto CA 94304, USA Email: braunl@informatik.uni-stuttgart.de Email: thapar@hplabs.hp.com Phone: +(1) 415-857-6284 Please send submissions for the following areas to Thomas Braunl: - Parallel Processing (SIMD) - Artificial Neural Networks - Vision and Image Processing - AI and Expert Systems - Robotics - Visualization Please send submissions for the following areas to Manu Thapar: - Parallel Processing (MIMD) - Computer Architecture - Local Area Networks - Telecommunication Systems - Real-Time Systems - VLSI Systems - Data Base Systems PUBLICITY CHAIR George Kesidis Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Davis Centre, University of Waterloo Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1 Canada Email: kesidis@panther.uwaterloo.ca Phone: +(1) 519-885-1211 x5338 Fax: +(1) 519-746-3077 ================================ STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBERS Dharma Agrawal (NCSU, USA), Kallol Bagchi (Stanford U, USA), Giovanni Chiola (U Torino, Italy), Doug DeGroot (TI, USA), Patrick Dowd (SUNY-Buffalo, USA), Herb Schwetman (MCC, USA), Kishor Trivedi (Duke U, USA), Jean Walrand (UC Berkeley, USA). ================================ PROGRAM COMMITTEE MEMBERS Dharma Agrawal (NCSU, USA), Nader Bagherzadeh (UCI, USA), M. Bettaz (U Constantine, Algeria), Thomas Braunl (U Stuttgart, Germany), Jim Burr (Stanford U, USA), Giovanni Chiola (U Torino, Italy), Gianfranco Ciardo (College William and Mary, USA), Doug DeGroot (TI, USA), Patrick Dowd (SUNY-Buffalo, USA), Larry Dowdy (Vanderbilt U, USA), Michel Dubois (USC, USA), Serge Fdida (U Rene Descartes, France), Paul Fishwick (U Florida, USA), Jean-Michel Fourneau (Lab-MASI, France), Geoffrey Fox (Syracuse U, USA), Rhys Francis (CSIRO, Australia), Richard Fujimoto (Georgia Tech, USA), Erol Gelenbe (Duke U, USA), Levent Gun (IBM RTP) Dipak Ghosal (Bellcore, USA), Dave Harper (U Texas, USA), Guy Juanole (LAAS, France), Bob Jump (Rice U, USA), George Kesidis (U Waterloo, Canada), Jason Lin (Bellcore, USA), Darrell Long (UCSC, USA), Vijay Madisetti (Georgia Tech, USA), Guenter Mamier (U Stuttgart, Germany), M Ajmone Marsan (Poly Torino, Italy), Ben Melamed (NEC Princeton, USA), Debasis Mitra (AT&T Bell Labs, USA), Arne Nilsson (NC State) Tuncer Oren (U Ottawa, Canada), Raif Onvural (IBM RTP), Mary Lou Padgett (Auburn U, USA), Gerardo Rubino (INRIA, France), Eugen Schenfeld (NEC Princeton, USA), Herb Schwetman (MCC, USA), Roger Shepard (Inmos, UK), Alan J. Smith (UC Berkeley, USA), Shreekant Thakkar (Intel, USA), Manu Thapar (HP Palo Alto, USA), Satish Tripathi (U Maryland, USA), Kishor Trivedi (Duke U, USA), Ioannis Viniotis (NC State), Jean Walrand (UC Berkeley, USA). Peter Wilke (U Erlangen, Germany), Steve Winter (Poly. C. London, UK), Larry Wittie (SUNY Stony Brook, USA), Felix Wu (UC Berkeley, USA), Bernie Zeigler (U Arizona, USA), George Zobrist (U Missouri-Rolla, USA) ================================ PUBLICITY COMMITTEE MEMBERS Europe: Guy Juanole, Laboratoire D'Automatique et D'Analyse des Systemes, France email: juanole@laas.lass.fr Ramon Puigjaner i Trepat, Universitat de les Illes Balears, Spain email: dmirpt0@ps.uib.es North America: George Kesidis, University of Waterloo, Canada email: gkesidis@ee.uwaterloo.ca Tom Malloy, Clemson University, USA email: malloy@cs.clemson.edu Asia and Australia: M. Atiquzzaman, La Trobe University, Australia email: atiq@latcs1.lat.oz.au ================================ Please return (preferably by Email) the following information to the publicity chair George Kesidis (kesidis@panther.uwaterloo.ca) if you are interested in receiving further announcements of this workshop: International Workshop on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS '95) Name: __________________________________________________________ Affiliation: __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ Phone: __________________________________________________________ Fax: __________________________________________________________ Email: __________________________________________________________ I intend to submit a paper to MASCOTS '95: YES [ ] NO [ ] Send to George Kesidis at kesidis@panther.uwaterloo.ca, or mail to: Prof. George Kesidis Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Davis Centre, University of Waterloo Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1 Canada **********************************************************************