****************REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER******************** No. 32. Contents 1. Message from the Moderator! (Anthony Finkelstein) 2. Systems Requirements Analysis Seminar Abstracts 3. ESEC'95 Call for Papers (Pere Botella) 4. SE research positions at the NASA IV&V Facility (Jack R. Callahan) 5. CFP-IFIP8.1 WC Information Systems Development for Decentralised Organisations (John Krogstie) 6. A Journal in Requirements Engineering? (Peri Loucopoulos) 7. Research Assistant in Requirements Engineering (Ian Sommerville) 8. International Symposium and Workshop on Systems Engineering of Computer Based Systems (Bernhard Thome) 9. Stevens Lecture on Software Development Methods (Elliot Chikofsky) 10. Rank Xerox Research Centre Cambridge Technical Reports (Alex Zbyslaw) 11. Inaugral Meeting of the RE Specialist Group of the BCS (Bashar Nuseibeh) 12. ICSE-17 Workshop on Architectures for Software Systems (David Garlan) 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: Message from the Moderator! As you are already aware I am in the process of moving to City University so there may be some disruption in the smooth flow of RE newsletters. I apologise for this in advance. Last week I was at the "Systems Requirements Analysis: Management & Exploitation" seminar at Schloss Dagstuhl. The meeting (organised by Matthias Jarke, Alastair Sutcliffe, Peri Loucopoulos and John Mylopoulos) was very enjoyable and informative. I understand that official discussion summaries will be produced, in the mean time I list the position papers that appear in the seminar notes along with (where given) the email of the author. Good news for the RE community is the high number of submissions for RE95 (the IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering). This speaks well for the industry and growth of work in the field. ********************************************************************** Subject: Systems Requirements Analysis Seminar Abstracts NOTE: quickly typed in apologies for errors Systems Requirements Analysis: Management & Exploitation Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, October 4th-7th 1994. Requirements Engineering in the Year 2001: on (Virtually) Managing a Changing Reality Matthias Jarke and Klaus Pohl Informatik V, RWTH Aachen jarke@informatik.rwth-aachen.de Trends in society and technology force requirements engineering (RE) to expand its role from one-shot activity in the development process to a virtual image that accompanies the changing reality of a system. A maturing software market will require a better understanding of the differentiation in market segments also for RE, and standardisation of methodologies within these segments. On the research side, this will require a coherent perspective of hitherto parallel research directions towards a comprehensive understanding of requirements processes, as well as the optimal exploitation of new technologies that support the main role of requirements engineering: mutual learning of all stakeholders concerned. Requirements: how to organise them for reuse B. Pernici, Politecno di Milano pernici@elet.polimi.it In general, the requirement engineering process has been experienced to be difficult and time consuming; the main reasons for difficulties are in the abstraction and organisation of large amounts of knowledge. In fact, users have to recognise relevant and important aspects of the business, recall and formulate their knowledge about these aspects, and finally represent this knowledge in a suitable representation formalism. The purpose of the research performed within the Information Systems group at Politecniso de Milano within F3 (from Fuzzy to Formal) ESPRIT Project is to present an approach to requirement engineering to support reuse, by providing a library of reusable components. The benefit of the approach is that new applications can be developed by reusing reference requirement components, therefore improving the quality of requirements in new application developments. A methodology and tools for building a reuse library have been defined within the F3 project. We concentrated on requirements modelled using the Enterprise Model (EM) developed at SISU/F3 Reference Manual/, and in particular working on the objectives model (OM) and on the concepts model (CM). OM and CM respectively support a coherent design of the business goals and of the data needed to reach these goals. Therefore, they are sufficient to illustrate the problems involved in capturing different aspects of the requirements in order to produce a set of separated but consistent and linked schema's. The proposed approach can be extended to other models, and some experiments have been performed with Entity-Relationships schemes, in particular within a project in cooperation with the Italian Central Public Administration. ALBERT at the Age of Two Eric Dubios Institut d'Informatique edu@info.fundp.ac.be Since 1992, Mainly under the framework of the Esprit II ICARUS project, the RE team in Namur1 has been involved in the development of the ALBERT language (an acronym for "Agent-oriented Language for Building and Eliciting Requirements for real-Time systems"), a language that has been designed for the purpose of modelling Functional requirements related to real-time cooperative systems. In this paper, we outline some features of the language before to briefly discuss some on-going and two future research perspectives. Canonical Exceptions M. S. Feather USC/Information Sciences institute feather@isi.edu Software components are employed within many systems because of the flexibility that they provide. They can be tuned, extended, customized, etc. to the particulars of the application within which they are embedded. Yet, this flexibility comes at a price, primarily one of design rather than materials. a prevalent contributing factor to this design costs is the need to accommodate exceptional conditions, one of the areas of flexibility for which software is prized. My focus herein is the disciplined design of exception handling. My belief is that it is during requirements engineering that exceptions and their treatments should be related to the idealized goals the system seeks to achieve. Compromises and approximations of these goals give rise to the need to tolerate exceptions, and the appropriate responses when those exceptions arise. By canonical exceptions I mean commonly reoccurring forms of exceptions (and their handling) that arise in many systems, across many domains. In the realms of programming and specification the support of exception handling has given rise to general-purpose tools, language constructs and methodologies. The challenge is to extend these to the requirements phase of system design. Many Business Processes and Related Complex Structured Objects: A High-Level Petri Net Approach Andreas Oberweis Institut AIFB oberweis@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de The requirements engineering process of business applications includes a business process modelling step. This is a prerequisite to business process redesign and improvement which should be prior to system design and implementation. Requirements Engineering as Knowledge Creation-Towards Incremental Approach to Method Adoption and Use Kalle Lyytinen University of Jyvaskyla kalle@jytko.jyu.fi Determining required properties of information systems - called often the information requirements capture, requirements specification of requirements engineering forms one of the bottle-neck information systems development. There are several reasons for this. First, it can be characterised as a difficult activity: it combines diverse skills (both technical and social) (Vitalari 1985), is inherently complex in terms of size and volume, is ambiguous and open-ended (Simon 1979) as it embraces all the stockholders, and incorporates all the vices of initiating social change (Keen 1981). Second it is a diverse activity in the sense that the scope and variation in contingencies that affect requirements engineering is a dynamic activity in the sense that is extends over nearly all periods of systems development and also that the properties of this process can change drastically over time. There is also a second meaning of dynamism. This meant that the way how requirements engineering is conducted can change drastically over time as people learn to accomplish this activity better. Finally, the wide attention and interest in requirements engineering is understandable because of the critical nature of the activity (Curtis et al. 1988). Since the mid 70's many students of computer Science, information systems and organisational behaviour have pointed out that one of the major reasons for large information systems disasters has been the poor quality and unskilled conduct of requirements engineering (Lyytinen and Hirschheim 1987) Despite intense research activity in the area-especially in notations and tools to improve the efficiency and control of requirements engineering the progress has not been satisfactory. one reason for this can be that problem is ultimately technically unsolvable- at the end we are dealing with organisational behaviour which deals with ambiguous, uncertain and conflicting phenomena. It is very unlikely that is can be addressed by any technical fix. Second, I want to argue in this paper that to some extent we have been looking at the wrong side of the problem. our major focus on the notations and tools has so far emphasised coping with and controlling the complexity of the representations of the requirements, but we have less explored how these representations are derived, how they are used during the systems development process, and to all these process can be improved over time as a dynamic phenomenon. how to improve out capability to deal with this dynamism is the topic of the position paper. Requirement Feedback: An Aid to Requirements Elicitation Paul G. Sorenson University of Alberta sorenson@cs.ualberta.ca J. P. Tremblay University of Saskatchewan Out primary interest in systems requirements are on the creation of support environments for requirement and design specifications (1) and on modelling requirements methods using our metaview metasystem that we have develop as a research prototype (2). Based on the experience plus teaching software engineering courses and supervision many software projects, we believe that one of the fundamental difficulties is miscommunication if information processing needs between the users of the software system and the system developers. Once a complete, consistent and formal (or semi-formal) requirements specification has been created, the remaining development activities (design, implementation and test) can require substantial effort, nevertheless generally proceeds without major conceptual difficulties. The major conceptual bottlenecks are most often found during the process of trying to elicit requirements for the user. A Course on Requirements Engineering Anthony Finkelstein City University acwf@city.ac.uk This short position paper outlines the content and structure of a course on requirements engineering. Metaphysical Databases: a short comment on the inability to analyse the usage of information technology in traditional conceptual modelling Peter Holm Stockholm University pholm@dsv.su.se In recent years, there has emerged a set of new methods and tools that aims at analyse and model the usage of information technology. In this paper we formulate a set of requirements on an ideal modelling framework for such analyses. In the end of the paper it is shown how we can create a modelling framework that meets all the listed requirements. The core part of the paper shows that it is impossible to meet any of the listed requirements in traditional conceptual modelling. This problem is called "the problem with the metaphysical database" since it is impossible to describe the database per se. We have then assumed a specific approach to process modelling, called "the state transition approach". An alternative approach is also discussed, "the data-flow approach". It has the power to meet some of the listed requirements. However, the use of data-flow diagrams can be negatively influenced by a model theoretical way of thinking, so that the potential expressiveness can not be fully effectuated. This will happen is we assume that all kinds of information are models of some universe of discourse. This problem is called "the database version of the descriptive fallacy". In the end of the paper it is argued that we need to make a strict theoretical differentiation between referential and usage of an information system when we discuss different analysis methods used in the development of automated information systems. What should be in a requirement specification? How do we get it here? Alistair Sutcliffe City University A starting point for the 'what should in an RE specification' question is to consider the inputs and outputs of requirements engineering. The RE process starts with coarse grained and ambiguous statements about the intended system. Users may have different visions of the system to only partial and incomplete ideas about what they want. Input is characteristically informal in its representation, vague and personally-owned, as requirements are initially held by individuals who frequently disagree. However, the desired output from RE is very different. It should be a complete system specification using a formal language on which all people involved have agreed. Transformation from informal input to formal output motivates the three dimensions (Jarke and Pohl 1993, Pohl, 1993) of the RE process: improving and ambiguous requirement description into precise and complete system specification; transforming informal knowledge into formal representations establishing a concensus agreement in the specification from personal views. Integrating Diagrammatic and Formal Requirements Descriptions Martin Wirsing Universitaet Munchen Current requirements engineering methods, such as SSADM, Object-Oriented Analysis or SDL use a combination of notations including entity-relation diagrams, data flow and control flow diagrams, object-oriented diagrams and finite state machines. Other, mostly academic methods, such as CIP, ERAE and NATURAL propose fully formal descriptions for the functional requirements. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages: the informal diagrammatic methods are easier to understand and to apply but they can be ambiguous and sue to the different nature of the employed diagrams and descriptions it is often difficult to get a comprehensive view of all requirement. On the other hand, the formal approaches are more difficult to learn and to communicate to the user. But they provide mathematical rigour for analysis and prototyping of requirements. Integrating Specifications Panos Constantopoulos & George Spanoudakis Institute of Computer Science (panos, gs@ics.forth.gr Requirements analysis usually results into a set of different specification for the same system, which must be integrated. Integration involves elimination of discrepancies completion and validation and proceeds in stages of analysis and synthesis. Realising the discrepancies between specification may be due to differences in representation models and or modelling perspectives and practices, we propose and approach to the analysis stage using meta-modelling and similarity analysis, whereby comparison of components is achieved through their classification under domain-and model-independent abstractions, and a newly developed model of similarity Similarity Analysis for Process Modelling of Requirements Engineering George Spanoudakis, Panos Constantopoulos & Miranta Kiprioti Institute of Computer Science (gs,panos,cypriot)@ics.forth.gr Similarity analysis of process models traces could aid new enactment of these models and their revisions. Both these tasks are important concerning process models describing the creative activities of requirement engineering, since they cannot always provide detailed guidance and may be incomplete. Similarity analysis detects analogies between traced enactment's which reveal concrete examples on how, when and why certain steps in a process should be followed. Analogies also indicate commonalties in traces that may be missing form or violating the relevant models. These commonalties could be abstracted, by experienced software engineers, so as to refine or extend these models. The Role of AI in Requirements Engineering Kevin Ryan University of Limerick ryank@ul.ie There are two orthogonal aspects to the interaction between AI and RE. The more obvious is that we may look to AI to help solve many of the most difficult and crucial problems facing RE particularly those concerning knowledge storage and user acceptance. After a brief summary of the relationship between the fields of AI and RE some typical such problems are identified and the potential contribution of AI is estimated. The second aspect is that the achievements, limitations and methodology of AI have lessons for the RE community. AI's limited success in solving many of it's problems should form a cautionary reminder to RE researchers. We must be aware that realism and practicality are as important to effective deployment as are grand plans or novel concepts. The distinguishing characteristics of successful and accepted AI-based systems are used to identify some possibilities and pitfalls in the future. Requiemrents Engineering from the Viewpoint of Software Design M. Nagl Aachen University of Technology In the last year we have studied integration of RE and Design languages, we have built integrated RE and Design tools, and we have realised integration tools from RE to Design. Further SDE tools are not of interest for this workshop. Tool building has been mechanised by assuming a framework and using generator tools, which derive tools from an internal specification Requirements Engineering: Old Wine in New Bottles Arne Solvberg The Norwegian Institute of Technology Arne.Solvberg@idt.unit.no According to Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, engineering is the action, work or profession of an engineer, and requirements refer to that which is needed or necessary. So requirements engineering is the work of an engineer to find (and State) that which is needed to necessary. In a system development context requirement engineering should therefore mean the work of engineers to find what is needed in order to create a system with some stated purpose. Modelling "why" in Requirements - with an Example Eric S. K. Yu and John Mylopoulos University or Toronto As business environments continue to undergo rapid change, it is becoming increasingly important for information system developers to have a good understanding of the business environment for which their systems are being developed. Formal models that capture and organise knowledge about a business environment can facilitate understanding, and associated tools can support the rapid translation of formally-expressed requirement to design specifications and to implemented systems. (Jarke 1992) Configuration of Situation Methods and Tools to Facilitate Project-specific Requirements Engineering SK Brinkkemper, Frank Harmsen & Han Oei University of Twente (sjbr,harmsenloei,oei)@cs.utwente.nl This position paper states the necessity of combining proven fragments of existing requirements engineering techniques into a situational method, i.e. a project approach that is tuned to the project at hand. A language and support tool for the engineering of methods are discussed. ********************************************************************** From: Pere Botella Subject: ESEC'95 Call for Papers CALL FOR PAPERS ESEC'95 FIFTH EUROPEAN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING CONFERENCE Sitges, Barcelona, Spain September 25-28, 1995 Following the four previous ESECs held in Strasbourg, Warwick, Milano, and Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the fifth European Software Engineering Conference will again provide an international forum to bring together researchers, developers and users of software engineering technology. Professionals from academia, business and industry will meet to share information, evaluate results and explore new ideas on software engineering models, languages, methods, tools and practices. Original papers are welcome on topics including, but not limited to: - Requirements elicitation, specification and prototyping - Design methods and architectures - Testing and verification - Configuration management - Reuse of components: theory and practice - Application Frameworks - Process and product metrics - Software process: models and formalisation - Workflow Management and Business Process (Re-) Engineering - Software Engineering Environments - Real-time, safety-critical systems - Distributed systems - Technology transfer and practical evaluation from experience Submissions Papers (4 copies) should not be longer than 6000 words and should include a title page with a short abstract and the authors' addresses. Papers must be received by the Programme Chair by January 15 1995. If you prefer not to be identified to reviewers, you should not include authors' names in the body of the paper. We welcome correspondance by fax or e-mail but fax or electronic copies of papers will not be accepted. Submissions will be reviewed by the programme committee for originality, significance, timeliness, soundness and quality of presentation. You should make clear what is novel about your work and should compare it with related work. Theoretical papers should show how their results relate to software engineering practice; practical papers should discuss lessons learned and the causes of success or failure. It is once again planned to publish accepted papers in Springer LNCS. Tutorials Proposals for high-quality tutorials on any aspect of software engineering are welcome. Potential proposers should contact the Tutorial Chair for more information. Important dates Deadline for paper submissions: January 15, 1995 Tutorial submissions: March 10, 1995 Notification of acceptance: April 95 Final versions of papers due: June 95 Conference Location The conference will be held at the Antemare Hotel in Sitges, 36 Km. SW of Barcelona, 20 min. from the Barcelona International Airport, well connected to the Barcelona center by train (every 20 min.) and by several highways. Adresses: Executive Chair: Pere Botella, Facultat d'Informatica UPC Pau Gargallo 5, 08028 Barcelona, Spain Phone +34 3 401 6960, Fax +34 3 401 7113 E_mail: botella@lsi.upc.es Programme Chair: Wilhelm Schaefer, FB Mathematik/Informatik Universitaet -GH- Paderborn, D-33095 Paderborn Phone +49 5251 60 2428, Fax +49 5251 60 3836 E_mail: wilhelm@uni-paderborn.de Tutorial Chair: Gregor Engels, Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Leiden Niels-Bohrweg 1, NL-2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands Phone +31 71 277 069, Fax +31 71 276 985 E_mail: engels@wi.leidenuniv.nl For more information, contact the local arrangements chair: Victor Obach, DIFINSA P. Lesseps 31, 08023 Barcelona Phone +34 3 415 4141, Fax +34 3 415 5556 E_mail: esec95@fib.upc.es Organized by: The ESEC Steering Committee, including representatives of the following national societies: AFCET, AICA, ATI, BCS, GI and SI, also supported by NGI and OCG. In co-operation with: CEPIS and Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya Program Committee Members: Angel Alvarez (Spain) Vincenzo Ambriola (Italy) Naser Barghouti (USA) Pere Botella (Spain) Reidar Conradi (Norway) Jean-Claude Derniame (France) Ernst-Erich Doberkat (Germany) Veronique Donzeau-Gouge (France) Juergen Ebert (Germany) Gregor Engels (The Netherlands) John Favaro (Italy) Anthony Finkelstein (GB) Marcel Franckson (France) Alfonso Fuggetta (Italy) Volker Gruhn (Germany) Peter Hruschka (Germany) Mehdi Jazayeri (Austria) Gerti Kappel (Austria) Richard Kemmerer (USA) Guenther Koch (Spain) Jeff Kramer (GB) Petr Kroha (Germany) Michel Lacroix (Belgium) Axel van Lamsweerde (Belgium) Gonzalo Leon (Spain) Boris Magnusson (Sweden) Javier Martinez (Spain) Masao Matsumoto (Japan) Hausi Mueller (Canada) Oscar Nierstrasz (Switzerland) Henk Obbink (The Netherlands) Fernando Orejas (Spain) Wilhelm Schaefer (Germany) Ian Sommerville (GB) Ray Welland (GB) Jim Welsh (Australia) This Call for Papers and other information about ESEC'95 can be obtained trough the Facultat d'Informatica World-Wide-Web server in the following address: http://amoto.upc.es/Congressos/ESEC95.html ********************************************************************** From: callahan@cerc.wvu.edu (Jack R. Callahan) Subject: SE research positions at the NASA IV&V Facility Software Engineering Research Positions NASA Software IV&V Facility Fall 1994 The following positions are available immediately: Senior Software Engineering Research Scientist * Software Engineering Post-Doctoral Fellows Software Engineering Research Fellows* Software Engineering Research Associates* (* = open for sabbatical or visiting researchers) Applications are invited for positions within the Software Research Lab (SRL) at the new NASA Independent Software Verification and Validation Facility in Fairmont, West Virginia. The lab is operated by West Virginia University through a cooperative research agreement with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Headquarters Office of Safety and Mission Assurance (OSMA - Code Q). The NASA IV&V Facility was established to serve as a focal point for NASA software activities in order to improve the coordination and visibility of software projects within the agency. The Software Research Lab at the IV&V Facility works closely with on-site NASA and IV&V contract personnel on major software efforts including the Space Shuttle, Earth Observing System (EOS) and Space Station projects. In addition, the researchers are engaged in joint efforts with many NASA centers nationwide related to these and other software projects in support of the formation of NASA-wide software IV&V policies, guidelines, and standards. Researchers are needed in the following areas of software engineering: metrics, safety & criticality, process, V&V, testing, OT&E, requirements engineering, and formal methods. Applicants are expected to hold the Ph.D. degree in computer science or a closely related field with some experience in one or more of these areas. The IV&V Facility is located in Fairmont, West Virginia just 1.5 hours south of Pittsburgh on Interstate 79. It is 12 miles south of West Virginia University in Morgantown, WV. The Facility is a new, state-of-the-art building with over 50,000 sq. feet of space, redundant UPS, LAN, and T3 level WAN Internet connectivity. The building houses NASA, WVU, and contract personnel including NASA's Remote Sensing Archive Center project (RSPAC) that will provide public access to NASA earth and space science data via the Internet. Please send a cover letter, vita, reprints of recent publications, and direct three letters of recommendation to: Dr. John R. Callahan NASA IV&V Facility 100 University Drive Fairmont, WV 26554 Phone: 304-367-8235 FAX: 304-367-8211 Applicants can also send/direct their information via email (in ASCII or PostScript format) to: callahan@cs.wvu.edu Additional information about the IV&V Facility, the SRL, and these positions is available after Sept. 16, 1994 via the SRL WWW server at: http://research.ivv.nasa.gov/ (129.164.10.21) West Virginia University is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. The positions are subject to University approval. ********************************************************************** From: John Krogstie Subject: CFP-IFIP8.1 WC on IS Development for Decentralised Organisations CALL FOR PAPERS IFIP WG8.1 WORKING CONFERENCE ON INFORMATION SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT FOR DECENTRALISED ORGANIZATIONS TRONDHEIM, NORWAY, 21-23 August, 1995 SUBMISSION DATE: 10 February, 1995 ---------------------------------- Organizational efficiency in enterprises and public administration depends increasingly on the ability to support organizations which operate in networks of decentralised, autonomous units. Most of the routine tasks have already been thoroughly automated, in factories as well as in offices. Further improvement of organizational productivity depends on our ability to give adequate support to knowledge workers in organizations, and to make it easier to rapidly change information systems when organizational change is wanted. Technological change enables increased organizational effectiveness and efficiency. Human factors are of key importance as well as our ability to implement organizational structures that take advantage of the enabling information technologies. This IFIP WG8.1 Working Conference concentrate on a limited set of relevant issues. These are: * Information systems for business process re-engineering * Information systems for supporting cooperation between organizations, e.g., electronic commerce * IS support for improving the work flow in organizations * Information resource management * Methods and tools for decentralised information systems engineering * Methods and tools for establishing decentralised information systems ORGANIZATION General Chair: Keith Jeffery, Rutherford Appelton Laboratory, UK Program committee chair: Arne S|lvberg, NTH, University of Trondheim, Norway Organising chair: Odd Ivar Lindland, NTH, University of Trondheim, Norway Program coordinator: John Krogstie, ------------------- IDT, NTH, University of Trondheim, N-7034 Trondheim Norway Tlf: +47 73 593671 Fax: +47 73 594466 Email: johnkrog@idt.unit.no Program committee: Rudolf Andersen Norway Patrizia Asirelli Italy Martin Bever Germany Sjaak Brinkkemper The Netherlands Janis Bubenko Sweden Panos Constatopoulos Greece Georg Doukidis Greece Peter Egloff Germany Ted Goranson USA Alex Gray UK Sol Greenspan USA Matthias Jarke Germany John Kalmus UK Dimitris Karagiannis Austria Gerhard Klett Germany Eva Lindencrona Sweden Fred Lochovsky Hong Kong Peri Loucopoulos Great Britain Erich Neuhold Germany Mike Papazoglou Australia Barbara Pernici Italy Colin Potts USA Maria Orlowska Australia Colette Rolland France Gunter Schlageter Germany Yannis Vassiliou Greece Antony I. Wasserman USA Richard Welke USA INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS: ------------------------ Papers should not exceed 6000 words in length, and should be accompanied by full contact information i.e title of paper, name of contact, address, email address, telephone number and fax number. To SUBMIT EITHER: ------------------ Prepare a Postscript (.ps) version of the paper, and then transfer the paper using anonymous ftp: Prompt You write Comment ftp ftp.idt.unit.no Name: anonymous Password: 'xxxx@xxx.xxx.xx' %Your email address ftp> suniqe ftp> cd ifipconf ftp> put 'yourfile'.ps 'firstname'.'lastname'.ps %firstname and %lastname are your %own names ftp> bye If successful, send an e-mail to the program coordinator (johnkrog@idt.unit.no) with subject:IFIP-paper, having full contact information (see above). A confirmation of reception of the paper will be returned as soon as we have managed to print it out. OR: --- Submit five copies of each full paper to the program coordinator (no FAX submissions). All accepted papers will appear in the proceedings of the conference published by Chapman and Hall Additional up to date information on the conference will be available on WWW http://www.idt.unit.no/~johnkrog/ifip.html ------------------------------------------ IMPORTANT DATES: Deadline for paper submissions: 10 February, 1995 Notification of acceptance/rejection: 7 April, 1995 Camera-ready copy due 10 May, 1995 Conference: 23-25 August 1995 ********************************************************************** From: Peri Loucopoulos Subject: A Journal in Requirements Engineering? A Questionnaire on the scope and need of a journal in Requirements Engineering The questionnaire below is seeking to collect the opinions of the Requirements Engineering community on the scope and needs of a journal likely to be launched in the near future. Your help is much appreciated. Please send your reply to Peri Loucopoulos by 24th October 1994 SCOPE OF JOURNAL IN REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING The scope of the journal will be to provide a focus for treating problems, and solutions to the elicitation, representation and validation of requirements for the development of software intensive systems. Typically, the journal will provide an opportunity for the dissemination of results in: The state of practice including evaluations of different approaches in industrial-size projects. Analysis of cultural, political and organisational factors to the problem of requirements elicitation and specification (e.g. participation, stakeholder analysis, information gathering). Representation-oriented results (i.e. different `knowledge modelling' techniques including domain modelling, constraint modelling, enterprise modelling, task modelling etc.) Process-oriented results (i.e. different techniques to carrying out Requirements Engineering, including aspects of validation, verification, inspection, measurement, reuse, tracing etc.) Educational aspects of Requirements Engineering. Standards. Articles will be welcomed from practitioners and academics. QUESTIONNAIRE 1. Would a journal on requirements engineering fill a gap in the market? 2. Are you in agreement with the aims and scope of the journal? If not, could you outline your reasons why? 3. Do you feel that there are other areas that should/could be included in the journal? 4. As well as traditional academic papers, is there any other type of material that you feel should be included? 5. Do you have any comments/suggestions regarding the title of the journal? 6. Would you be interested in contributing to the journal? 7. With regard to subscribing, would you be interested in personally subscribing and/or would you recommend it to your library? (Personal subscriptions are likely to be greatly reduced to members of computer societies such as BCS, ACM, IEEE etc) 8. Within the rationale proposed for this journal, which currently published journals would you choose? 9. Would you like to have a gopher or WWW server made available? If you would what sort of information would you want to access? 10. Please indicate how valuable you think this journal will be: A = Very valuable B = valuable C = fairly valuable D = of limited use E = of no use whatsoever 11. If you have any other comments or suggestions please list them below. ********************************************************************** From: Ian Sommerville Subject: Research Assistant in Requirements Engineering Research Assistant in Requirements Engineering At Lancaster University, we have an immediate vacancy for a research assistant to work in the area of requirements engineering for safety-critical systems. The work will involve developing and enhancing a viewpoint-oriented requirements engineering method and associated toolset, integrating this with safety analysis methods and developing case studies using the method. The principal application domain will be large, mobile robots but some work may also be concerned with investigating the use of the method for railway signalling and aircraft systems. The ideal applicant will have a PhD (or be writing a PhD thesis), experience in requirements engineering and object-oriented systems development. However, our requirements are flexible and we are willing to consider any enthusiastic applicants who do not meet this profile exactly. The salary offered will be up to 16, 000 pounds p.a. for up to 2 years. Registration for a PhD or M.Phil degree may be possible for suitable applicants. For more information, contact: Ian Sommerville (is@comp.lancs.ac.uk) or +44-524-593795 ********************************************************************** From: Bernhard.Thome@zfe.siemens.de (Dr. Bernhard Thome) Subject: Int. Symp. & Workshop on Systems Engineering of Computer Based Systems Call for Papers and Participants IEEE Computer Society Task Force on the Engineering of Computer Based Systems (ECBS) and Electrical and Computer Engineering The University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona announce an International Symposium and Workshop on Systems Engineering of Computer Based Systems March 6 - 9, 1995 Holiday Inn City Center Tucson, Arizona The symposium is the eighth in a series of IEEE sponsored meetings dedicated to formulating and advancing methodologies and techniques for engineering of computer based systems (ECBS). This emerging discipline is devoted to design, development, deployment, and analysis of complex systems comprising heterogeneous, distributed, software, hardware, communication, and other components. Previous meetings and Task Force Working Groups have identified critical areas such as information and process models, architectures, tools, training and education, and forensic ECBS. Contributions are sought that advance the ECBS state-of-the-art in the following (and related) topics: * Requirements Elicitation and Analysis * Systems Analysis and Modeling * Systems Design and Development Process * Architectures and Environments * Simulation * Reliability and Safety * Testing * Case Studies * Training and Education In addition to regular paper sessions, plenary tutorial presentations are planned. Ample time will be left for debate in the Working Group sessions with round table group discussions. Submissions: Five (5) copies of extended abstracts (2000 words) must be received by November 15, 1994 (hard copies only). The abstracts will be refereed and authors will be notified of acceptance by January 10, 1995. At least one author of each paper is expected to present the paper at the conference. Any technical inquires should be directed to the General Chair. All submissions and registrations should be directed to: Mr. Paul Baltes Engineering Professional Development The University of Arizona Box 9 Harvill Building, Room 235 Second and Olive Streets Tucson, Arizona 85721 USA tel. + (602) 621-3054 fax. + (602) 621-1443 e-mail: baltes@bigdog.engr.arizona.edu Timetable: Extended Abstracts Due: November 15, 1994 Notification of Acceptance: January 10, 1995 Formatted Papers Due: January 30, 1995 Symposium Dates: March 6 - 9, 1995 General Chair: Prof. Jerzy Rozenblit Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering The University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona 85721 USA tel. + (602) 621-6177 fax. + (602) 621-8076 e-mail: jr@ece.arizona.edu Program Chair: Prof. Bonnie Melhart Department of Computer Science Texas Christian University 2800 West Bowie/Sid Richardson Bldg. Fort Worth, Texas 76129 USA tel. + (817) 921-7166 Keynote Speaker: Prof. Andrew Sage George Mason University Organizing Committee: Julian Holtzman (University of Kansas, USA) Steven Howell (NSWS, USA) Jonah Lavi (CBSE Associates, Israel) Harold Lawson (Lawson Publishing and Consulting, Sweden) Bernhard Thome (Siemens AG, Germany) Stephanie White (Northrop Grumman, USA) Program Committee: Perry Alexander, University of Cincinnati Mack Alford, Ascent Logic Terry Bahill, The University of Arizona Maarten Boasson, Hollandse Signaalapparatem, The Netherlands Klaus Buchenrieder, Siemens AG, Germany William Chapman, Hughes Missile Systems Elliot Chikofsky, DMR Group, Inc. Darren Dalcher, South Bank University, U.K. April Gillam, The Aerospace Corp. Peter Hruschka, CAD Debis, Germany Ken Jackson, Ken Jackson Associates, Ltd. U.K. Nicolas Karangelen, Trident Systems, Inc. Jacek Malec, Linkopping University, Sweden William McCumber, Loral Federal Systems Henk Obbink, Philips Research, The Netherlands Dave Oliver, Model Based Systems, Inc. Hans Rischel, Technical University of Denmark Wilhelm Rossak, New Jersey Institute of Technology Peter Schaefer, Daimler Benz, Germany Gerhard Schweizer, University of Karlsruhe, Germany Hugo Simpson, British Aerospace Defence, Ltd. Colin Tully, Colin Tully Associates Registration: Registration will be held on Monday, March 6, 1995 from 7:00 - 8:00 a.m. in the Foyer of the Empire Ballroom of the Holiday Inn City Center, 181 West Broadway, Tucson, Arizona 85701. The symposium begins at 8:00 a.m. in the Empire Ballroom. Accommodations We have reserved blocks of rooms for participants at the following hotels for arrival on March 5th. Be sure to mention you are attending the Systems Engineering of Computer Based Systems Symposium. Please note each hotel's cutoff date as reservations will be provided on a space available basis after this time. The Holiday Inn City Center, 181 West Broadway, Tucson, Arizona 85701, phone 602-624-8711, is holding a block of rooms for participants at the special rate of $75.00 plus 9.5%+ $1.00 for single or double occupancy. Reservations must be made by February 5, 1995 to guarantee this rate. Be sure to mention you are attending the Systems Engineering of Computer Based Systems Symposium. The Holiday Inn City Center is the site of the symposium. The Santa Rita Park Inn International, 88 East Broadway, Tucson, Arizona 85701, phone 602-622-4000, FAX: 602-620-0376. Rates are $52.00 plus 9.5% + $1.00 for single or double occupancy. Reservations must be made by February 5, 1995. The Santa Rita Park Inn International is 2 blocks from The Holiday Inn City Center. The Tucson Desert Inn, 1 N. Freeway/At Congress, Tucson, AZ 85745, phone, 602-624-8151, FAX 602-882-0884. Rates are $26.00 plus 9.5% + $1.00 single occupancy. There is no cutoff date for reservations. The Tucson Desert Inn is 1.5 miles from The Holiday Inn City Center. Transportation: Tucson is served through Tucson International Airport by Aeroliterol, Aeromexico, American Airlines, American Eagle, America West Airlines, Arizona Airlines, Continental Airlines, Delta Airlines Northwest Airlines, Reno Air, Southwest Airlines and United Airlines. Ground transportation is available to the various hotels from the airport via Arizona Stagecoach. Exhibits: Technical exhibits are planned to accompany the technical program throughout the conference. About Tucson: March is a beautiful month in Tucson, Arizona. The skies are sunny daily. Highs are around 80 F with the lows around 60 F. Tucson is literally surrounded by very picturesque mountains and exciting places to see. Within the city are many museums and historic sites which give an insight into this part of Arizona's colorful past. Beyond Tucson proper are many adventures which will make your visit memorable. Registration Form Name Affiliation Address City State Zip Country Phone Fax E-Mail Registration Fee (includes proceedings, coffee breaks and Monday reception) Per Person $ 295.00 Monday reception guest tickets $ 20.00 x no. Tuesday Banquet tickets $ 35.00 x no. Total Enclosed $ Please make checks payable to: The University of Arizona If you wish to use your Visa, Mastercard or Discover Card for registr= ation: Card No. Exp. Signature Date I have the following special needs/requirements: Detach and Mail/Fax/E-mail this form to: Engineering Professional Development The University of Arizona Box 9 Harvill Building, Room 235 Second and Olive Streets Tucson, AZ 85721 phone (602) 621-3054 FAX: (602) 621-1443 E-Mail: baltes@bigdog.engr.arizona.edu ********************************************************************** From: Elliot Chikofsky Subject: Stevens Lecture on Software Development Methods CALL FOR NOMINATIONS for the inaugural +-----------------------------------+ | STEVENS LECTURE | | ON SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT METHODS | +-----------------------------------+ The purpose of the Stevens Lecture is to advance the state of software development methods and enhance their continuing evolution. The award recipient is recognized for outstanding contributions to the literature or practice of methods for software development. The lecture presentation will focus on advancing or analyzing the state of software methods and their direction for the future. The award includes a significant honorarium and travel to the lecture site. This award lecture is named in memory of Wayne Stevens (1944-1993), a highly-respected consultant, author, pioneer, and advocate of the practical application of software methods and tools. His 1974 article "Structured Design" was the first published on the topic and remains the most widely reprinted article from the IBM Systems Journal. He was the author of the books Software Design: Concepts and Methods (Prentice-Hall Intl, 1991) and Using Structured Design (Wiley, 1981). His last article "Data Flow Analysis and Design" appears in the Encyclopedia of Software Engineering (Wiley, 1994). Stevens was the chief architect of IBM's application development methodology. The first Stevens Lecture will be presented at CASE '95, the 7th International Workshop on Computer-Aided Software Engineering, at Toronto, Ontario, Canada in July 1995. The Stevens Lecture is presented by IWCASE, the international sponsoring association of the CASE workshop - the principal technical meeting of the CASE field. Nominations may be submitted by letter, fax, or electronic mail and must include a description of the contribution of the nominee (up to 3 pages), citations of key contributions to the literature on software methods, and contact information for both the nominee and the nominator. Send nominations by January 16, 1995 to: Stevens Lecture Committee fax 617-272-8464 IWCASE email iwcase@computer.org P.O. Box 400 Burlington, MA 01803-0501 USA Questions and requests for information should be directed to the chair of the Stevens Lecture Committee: Elliot Chikofsky, DMR Group Inc. phone 617-487-9026; fax 617-487-5752; email e.chikofsky@computer.org INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON CASE (IWCASE) Executive Board John Jenkins, City University London (United Kingdom) Ron Norman, San Diego State University (USA) Elliot Chikofsky, DMR Group & Northeastern Univ (USA) Homa Taraji, Aerospace Corp. (USA) Swee-Cheang Lim, National Univ of Singapore (Singapore) Francois Coallier, Bell Canada (Canada) Gene Forte, Forte Research (USA) Karl Reed, La Trobe University (Australia) Jacob Slonim, IBM Canada (Canada) Hausi Muller, University of Victoria (Canada) ********************************************************************** From: Zbyslaw@europarc.xerox.com Subject: Rank Xerox Research Centre Cambridge Technical Reports Technical Reports from the Rank Xerox Research Centre Cambridge are now available from the World Wide Web. You may obtain a copy of the report in the following ways: World Wide Web: Via our home page: http://www.xerox.com/RXRC/Cambridge/html/camrc.html Or directly from the Technical Reports page: http://www.xerox.com/RXRC/Cambridge/trs/html/index.html FTP: We hope to have reports available by anonymous FTP in the last quarter of 1994. An announcement will be sent to this list to inform you of availability. Paper: Paper copies of Technical Reports and the Technical Report List cost: UK: 1 pound sterling each Overseas: 2 pounds sterling each Rank Xerox, Xerox and Free of charge Fuji Xerox: Send your order to: Receptionist Rank Xerox Research Centre Cambridge Laboratory 61 Regent Street Cambridge CB2 1AB UNITED KINGDOM Full payment in sterling must accompany each order. ********************************************************************** From: ban@doc.ic.ac.uk (Bashar Nuseibeh) Subject: Inaugral Meeting of the RE Specialist Group of the BCS Inaugral Meeting of the BCS Requirements Engineering Specialist Group THEME: Requirements Traceability TIME: 2:00-5:00pm, Wednesday, 19th October 1994. PLACE: Room 418, Department of Computing, Imperial College, 180 Queen's Gate, London SW7 2BZ (nearest tubes: Sth. Kensington and Gloucester Rd.) PROGRAMME: Introduction: Bashar Nuseibeh (Imperial College), "The Requirement's Engineering Specialist Group of the BCS". Followed by short panel presentations by: [1] Prof. Anthony Finkelstein (City University), "Requirements Traceability: Research Problems and Research Directions". My talk will concentrate on outstanding problems in requirements traceability and will attempt to define a research agenda in this area. I will consider requuirements traceability in the context of software engineering research. I will briefly review the state-of-the-art. I will point to areas in which further work is needed. I will suggest some promising research directions in these areas. [2] Dr. Laurence James (Marconi Systems Technology), "The Four Levels of Requirements Traceability". In this talk I describe the different levels of traceability in typical use both in projects and in real life The Requirements & Traceability Management (RTM), is used to illustrate these different levels. RTM is a suite of multi-user configurable tools designed to facilitate the capture, management, traceability and documentation of systems engineering data in the many forms that it exists within the systems development lifecycle. This includes support for both textual and graphical requirements data, data held in Computer Aided Systems Engineering (CASE) tools such as "RDD100", "Teamwork" or "Software Through Pictures" as well as engineer specifiable (generic) information sets. [3] Richard Stevens (QSS Ltd., Oxford), "Information Linkages within Projects". Traceability is one form of the links that represent the relationships between different elements within a project. Links can be used, for example, as a path to replicate information (hypertext), or to represent the relationship back to a customer requirement (contractual traceability). But many other types of links are needed including: * Applicability links - where a non-functional requirement is applied to a functional requirement; * Grouping links - representing connections between grouped items; * Interface links - representing the flow of information or physical material between two components inside a system; * Control links - representing the control paths between system components; * Test links - between requirements, test system and product; The types of links needed cannot be defined in advance. In any individual project, users will need to make arbitrary types of links to express the re-use of components, or the different types of users involved, or the safety criticality of different functions. Building a system requires a variety of models, and links are the means by which different models interact. The systems process, expressed by the systems standard involved, defines the models, the types of links that are necessary, when they need to be made, and when they can be broken. Linkages are expensive both to make and to change. A fundamental objective of a system standard is actually to minimise the need to make and to change linkages (to avoid circular links for example). Traceability is therefore defined as a by-product of the systems definition process. [4] Prof. David Budgen (Keele University), "Tracing requirements through design" The activities of requirements elicitation and design development may both make use of `scenarios' to explore the attributes and properties of a problem (requirements) and the proposed solution (design). The criteria used for choosing scenarios seem to be largely if not completely `ad hoc' in nature, and my presentation will discuss some ideas about how these might be derived in a more systematic manner. ----- Presentations will be followed by an open discussion and questions to the panellists. ENTRY: FREE For more information about the innaugral meeting and/or the RE specialist group, please contact Bashar Nuseibeh (Imperial College) at ban@doc.ic.ac.uk. ********************************************************************** Subject: Workshop on Architectures for Software Systems From: garlan@cs.cmu.edu CALL FOR PARTICIPATION Workshop on Architectures for Software Systems (In association with ICSE-17) April 24-25, 1995 Seattle, Washington USA Workshop Chair: David Garlan Department of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891 USA (412) 268-5056 (office) (412) 268-5576 (fax) garlan@cs.cmu.edu Workshop Committee: Bob Balzer, ISI (USA) Jeff Kramer, Imperial College (UK) Barry Boehm, USC (USA) Dewayne Perry, ATT Bell Labs (UK) Martin Griss, HP Labs (USA) Mary Shaw, CMU (USA) Doug Lea, SUNY Oswego Will Tracz, Loral (USA) & NY CASE Center (USA) Alexander Wolf University of Colorado (USA) As systems become morecomplex, the high-level organization of the overall system --- the software architecture --- becomes a critical aspect of design. Architectural concerns include organization of a system as a composition of components; global control structures; protocols for communication, synchronization, and data access; assignment of functionality to design elements; physical distribution; scaling and performance; dimensions of evolution; and selection among design alternatives. Recently, software architecture has begun to emerge as an important field of study for software engineering practitioners and researchers. Architectural issues are being addressed by work in areas such as module interface languages, domain-specific architectures, software reuse, codification of organizational patterns for software, architectural description languages, formal underpinnings for architectural design, and architectural design environments. While there has been considerable recent activity in this area, much of it has gone on in small groups and many of the projects underway are operating without detailed knowledge of other efforts. This workshop will bring together researchers and practioners interested in software architecture to discuss the current state of the practice and art. The primary goal will be to establish a common understanding of the state of the practice, the kinds of research and development efforts that are in progress, and the important challenges for this emerging field. The workshop will take place over two days. The activities of the workshop will center around invited talks summarizing recent work in software architecture, as well as in-depth discussions of selected topics. While the list of focus topics will depend on the interests of the participants, examples include: abstractions for architectural design, domain-specific software architecture, architectural specification, integration of architectural development in the broader context of software engineering, architecture guidelines for maintainable and evolvable systems, architectural selection and invention. To be admitted into the workshop, potential attendees must submit a position paper or conference-length paper on their recent work in software architecture. Six copies of papers should be sent by November 15, 1994 to the workshop chair. Selected papers and workshop summaries will be published in a special issue of ACM Software Engineering Notes. IMPORTANT DATES: Position paper due: November 15, 1994 Date of notification of acceptance: January 15, 1995 Final version of position papers due: March, 1995 Workshop: April 24-25, 1995 **********************************************************************