Articles

Michael Mey, Managing Consultant at Obvious Works, holds a diploma in Computer Science from Furtwangen University, Germany, where he first explored AI and neural networks. With extensive experience in international software projects, particularly in the financial industry, Michael has held key roles at major corporations and launched a crypto startup through an incubation program, blending corporate and entrepreneurial insights. An Agile coach and trainer, he specializes in Requirements Engineering and AI integration. Michael is engaged in the IREB Special Interest Group AI and regularly speaks at conferences like REConf, REFSQ, and Scrum Day. As co-creator of the AIxRE Masterclass, he is dedicated to helping organizations optimize their processes by integrating AI into Requirements Engineering practices.

• AI Assistants in Requirements Engineering | Part 1

Nuno Santos is currently a Senior Business Analyst at Natixis Portugal. He holds a PhD in Technologies and Information Systems, and is also certified from Agile Alliance as CSPO, and from the IIBA as CCBA, AAC and POA. He has also written articles about requirements, agility and product ownership at RE Magazine, BA Digest, Analyst Catalyst, Medium, and in several scientific conferences.

• Requirements Elicitation in Modern Product Discovery
• Inputs to requirements engineering in agile projects

For more than twenty years, Rainer Grau has accompanied companies on their way enterprise agility. He supports companies in their efforts to continuously develop and create sustainable value for customers and employees. For him, it is particularly exciting to find out which methods, techniques and approaches are suitable for scaling agility and building the right product and the right service for the customer. Business analysis and requirements engineering are two essential disciplines in this context, which also generate high value in an agile setup - even if perhaps lived completely differently compared to a classic project approach.

Rainer's background of experience in business agility is based on his consulting work with companies from various industries. Stages of his professional life include Distinguished Consultant and Partner at Zühlke Engineering, Head of Business Development at digitec Galaxus, responsible for courses at universities of applied sciences on the topic of agility, founder of the Swiss Agile Leaders Circle, founder of Denkplan Verein and active involvement in communities around agility, business analysis and requirements engineering.

If there is still time left, Rainer Grau likes to spend it with his family, doing sports, playing his guitar and reading novels.

• Mission Possible
• Innovation Arena

Gil Regev has been a researcher at EPFL since 1997 in the fields of enterprise information systems, requirements engineering, change management and knowledge management. Since 2008 he is also manager and consultant at Itecor, a boutique consultancy firm. Previously Gil developed software for computer peripherals at Logitech, in Switzerland and California.

• A General Systems Thinking Perspective on the CPRE

Alain Wegmann is a full professor at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences, EPFL, Switzerland. He worked 14 years for Logitech (Switzerland, Taiwan, US) in positions ranging from software developer, IS manager, manufacturing engineering to VP of engineering and OEM marketing before joining the EPFL in 1997. His teaching, consulting and research are in the fields of enterprise architecture, requirements engineering and service engineering.

• A General Systems Thinking Perspective on the CPRE

Olivier Hayard has been a consultant and in charge of IT and Knowledge Management at Itecor, a boutique consultancy firm, since 1993. Olivier’s main interests are business analysis and requirements management, as practitioner, trainer and researcher.

• A General Systems Thinking Perspective on the CPRE

Project manager since 2008, certified Scrum Product Owner, Agile Project Manager, with foundations of PRINCE2. Over six years of experience as a UX designer and researcher. Worked in digital agencies as a digital project manager, then switched to the client's side. Head of Product in iTaxi, then in Pergamin (e-signature). Worked also for libraries and museums in Poland to help improve the accessibility of digital products.

Awarded by Innovation Ad Award for the prototype for Sensodyne and by nomination in Mobile Trends for the mobile app for drivers. An author of articles about product management, user experience, and accessibility.

• The Potential of User Tests for Requirements Engineering

Daniel Méndez is an Associate Professor for Software Engineering at the Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden and Senior Scientist at fortiss, the research institute of the Free State of Bavaria for software-intensive systems and services. His research is on Empirical Software Engineering with a particular focus on interdisciplinary, qualitative research in Requirements Engineering and its quality improvement. He regularly publishes in various software engineering publications and has occupied several key positions in venues of the empirical software engineering community. He is a member of the ACM, the IEEE Computer Society, and the German association of university professors and lecturers, and he serves as the representative to ISERN, the International Empirical Software Engineering Research Network. Further information is provided at www.mendezfe.org.

• What is the Relevance of Requirements Engineering Research to Practitioners?
• Modeling Requirements and Context as a means for Automated Requirements Validation

Xavier Franch is Professor at the Universitat Politècnica de Barcelona (UPC-BarcelonaTech), Spain. He is Council Member and Full Member of the IREB association. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers in conferences and journals, many of them related to requirements engineering. He was Program Co-Chair of the RE’16 and REFSQ’11 conferences, and he belongs to the Editorial Board of the Requirements Engineering Journal (Springer) and Information Software and Technology (IST) journals, among others. He is coordinator of the Q-Rapids project and participates in the OpenReq project, both in the H2020 programme. He organizes workshops concerning requirements engineering for NLP4RE, CrowdRE, JIT-RE and others.

• What is the Relevance of Requirements Engineering Research to Practitioners?
• Modeling Requirements and Context as a means for Automated Requirements Validation

Andreas Vogelsang is a post-doc researcher in the software & systems engineering group at the Technical University of Munich. He works on model-based requirements engineering and participated in several research collaborations with industrial partners especially from the automotive industry. His research published was published in relevant international conferences like RE, REFSQ, or ICSE.

• What is the Relevance of Requirements Engineering Research to Practitioners?
• Modeling Requirements and Context as a means for Automated Requirements Validation

Hans van Loenhoud MSc is a consultant and teacher at Taraxacum in the Netherlands. He has been working in software development for more than 35 years, starting as a Cobol programmer and later on specialized in test and quality management.
In this role, he has been teaching various ISTQB test courses and has been chair of TestNet, the Dutch association of professional software testers. In recent years, he joined IREB to build a bridge between software testing and requirements engineering. He gives various Business Analysis, Requirements Engineering and Software Testing trainings. Hans is also a lecturer at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences for these topics and participates in the IREB advanced level Elicitation working group.

• On the right track
• The goal is to solve the problem
• Translating Exam Questions

Inge Kress is a specialist in psychosomatic medicine. Currently she works at the University Hospital of Erlangen/Germany. Her research and clinical work focuses on stress and emotion processing. Besides practicing medicine, she engages in medical education regarding psychosomatic issues, giving scientific lectures and workshops. Her main objective is to learn and teach about cognitive, emotional and physiological processes and their impact on mental and physical health, especially in work life.

• To Brainstorm or Not to Brainstorm

As a Requirements Engineering Consultant and Trainer with SOPHIST GmbH, Anja Schwarz supports clients of different fields in all requirements engineering aspects. As a trainer, she prepares her participants for the CPRE Foundation Level certification as well as for the CPRE Advanced Level Elicitation & Consolidation certification. She also supports the IREB e.V. as Lead of the Elicitation and Consolidation working group. The elicitation of innovative requirements and thus the requirements for creativity have always fascinated her, leading to the cooperation with Inge Kress. Together, they brought the neurological aspects of creativity into the context of requirements engineering, also resulting in this article.


• To Brainstorm or Not to Brainstorm

Freelance trainer and consultant in Software Engineering. 20 years of work experience, including 7 years as consultant and project manager, 10 years in research and university teaching, and two guest professorships. Associate member at IREB, co-author of syllabus and handbook for the CPRE Advanced Level in Requirements Management. www.herrmann-ehrlich.de

• Requirements Engineering in German Job Advertisements

Student of Informatics Teaching at the University of Heidelberg.

• Requirements Engineering in German Job Advertisements

Corrine Thomas is an experienced leader and Business Analyst with over 25 years of working across a range of industry sectors including Local Government, Healthcare, Telecommunications and Financial services. She has a proven track record of creating and transforming capability of business analysis practices through good people management, training and coaching. She also has many years’ experience of delivering business analysis on large scale change programmes. She is a qualified NLP trainer, coach, an inspiring conference speaker and published author.

• NLP for Requirements Engineers, Part 2
• NLP for Requirements Engineers, Part 1

Albena Georgieva is a senior requirements engineer with experience in the e-commerce and public domain. During her technology consultancy career at Capgemini she has successfully conducted and coordinated business analysis efforts as well as advised customers on the improvement of the requirements management process in complex corporate environments. Her most recent clients are KLM, Unilever and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
She is currently working on several e-commerce and digital marketing initiatives at KLM mainly in the roles of information analyst and product owner.

• NLP for Requirements Engineers, Part 2
• NLP for Requirements Engineers, Part 1

Bastian Tenbergen is an Assistant Professor for Computer Science at the State University of New York at Oswego. He has co-authored articles and contributed to several books in the area of Software Engineering. Bastian’s main research focus is on Model-Based Requirements Engineering, Context Analysis, and Safety of Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems. He has many years of project and consulting experience and has worked closely with industry.

• Modeling Requirements and Context as a means for Automated Requirements Validation

Andreas Vogelsang is a post-doc researcher in the software & systems engineering group at the Technical University of Munich. He works on model-based requirements engineering and participated in several research collaborations with industrial partners especially from the automotive industry. His research published was published in relevant international conferences like RE, REFSQ, or ICSE.

• Modeling Requirements and Context as a means for Automated Requirements Validation

Thorsten Weyer is a research group leader at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He has been a member of organization committees, program committees and reviewer for scientific conferences and journals. Thorsten gives regular lectures at the University and is an experienced conference speaker. He has also held several leading positions in research projects and technology transfer projects. He is member of the IREB council and head of the IREB working group Requirements Modeling.

• Modeling Requirements and Context as a means for Automated Requirements Validation

Andreas Froese works as a research assistant in the working group Software Systems Engineering (Prof. Dr. Klaus Pohl) at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He worked in several research projects where he was able to expand his knowledge in the domain of Requirements Engineering for software-intensive Embedded Systems, as well as in those of model-based Context Analysis and context-based Quality Assurance.

• Modeling Requirements and Context as a means for Automated Requirements Validation

Jan Christoph Wehrstedt works as a mathematician at the Technology Field Automation & Control at Siemens Corporate Technology. Currently he is Senior Key Expert for Efficient Simulation Driven System Development. He is the project manager of several business (Siemens internal) and public funded projects dealing with the integration of simulation and modeling approaches towards a simulation based engineering of technical systems and plants and it’s embedding into PLM lifecycle and tools.

• Modeling Requirements and Context as a means for Automated Requirements Validation

Veronika Brandstetter is a mathematician in the Technology Field Automation & Control at Siemens Corporate Technology. She is developing methods for seamless engineering and improved operation of technical systems based on simulation. Recently, she focused on simulation based design for manufacturing technologies. She has been working in various Siemens internal research projects as well as in publicly funded projects also managing part of them in different groups within the Technology Field.

• Modeling Requirements and Context as a means for Automated Requirements Validation

Sandra Leek is currently working as a Senior Lead Business Analyst for Lloyds Banking Group. She has been with the organisation for nearly 18 years during which she has taken on a number of roles including Programming and Project Management. She currently works across a number of business areas championing a One Team culture and pragmatic delivery.
In 2014 she was made BA of the Year and has formed part of the IIBA BA Conference committee for the last two years.
In her spare time she enjoys scuba diving, and although being based in Wales, prefers swimming in warmer climates. She also helps run her local scuba dive club and is actively involved in promoting live music, via a local blues club.
Sandra is also involved in her local community via her role as a magistrate.

• What makes Women Better BAs

Corrine Thomas is an experienced leader and Business Analyst with over 25 years of working across a range of industry sectors including Local Government, Healthcare, Telecommunications and Financial services. She has a proven track record of creating and transforming capability of business analysis practices through good people management, training and coaching. She also has many years’ experience of delivering business analysis on large scale change programmes. She is a qualified NLP trainer, coach, an inspiring conference speaker and published author.

• NLP for Requirements Engineers, Part 2
• NLP for Requirements Engineers, Part 1

Albena Georgieva is a senior requirements engineer with experience in the e-commerce and public domain. During her technology consultancy career at Capgemini she has successfully conducted and coordinated business analysis efforts as well as advised customers on the improvement of the requirements management process in complex corporate environments. Her most recent clients are KLM, Unilever and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
She is currently working on several e-commerce and digital marketing initiatives at KLM mainly in the roles of information analyst and product owner.

• NLP for Requirements Engineers, Part 2
• NLP for Requirements Engineers, Part 1

Martin Tate is an IT consultant who has now personally run or rescued 52 projects to select off-the-shelf solutions, interviewed over 725 people to capture the requirements for selections and appraised over 1,000 candidate solutions. A ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’, he formerly worked for an IT provider and was trained to sell software. BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, made him a Chartered Fellow for eminence in evaluating software and recently published his book, a practitioner guide to procuring off-the-shelf IT.

• IT Requirements when Buying, not Making

Dr. Christof Ebert is managing director at Vector Consulting Services. He supports clients around the world to improve product strategy and product development and to manage organizational changes. A trusted advisor for companies around the world, member of industry boards, he lectures at the Universities of Stuttgart and at the Sorbonne in Paris. He authored several books including the popular “Systematic Requirements Engineering”. Contact him at christof.ebert@vector.com

• Cyber Security Requirements Engineering
• Product Management

SOPHIST-in-chief (formally: founder and executive partner of the SOPHIST GmbH), chief consultant, coach and trainer. Looking back over 25 years of professional experience, a lot has come up: a company, 6 books, 55 employees, countless articles and presentations and a whole lot of experience. My passion for project consultation might account for the fact that, until now, I do not “only” manage, but I am still directly involved in projects and close to customers.
 

• Is there something missing?
• Requirements under construction

Before working for SOPHIST, Kristina has lived and worked abroad in an intercultural environment. Due to her linguistic studies she is comfortable working with communication models, semantics and syntax. She has developed an excellent feeling for languages based on theory and experience. As consultant and trainer, she benefits from this feeling in the field of elicitation, documentation and management of natural language requirements.

• Is there something missing?
• Requirements under construction

Stefan Meier is passionate about exploring and experimenting with new Requirements Engineering practices and methodologies. He many years of practical experience as Project Manager, Requirements Engineer  and Agile Coach. He loves talking to different stakeholders and sharpening their ideas and visions to get a crisp and clear understanding of their needs and values. 
He works at SPF Consulting and currently helps customers switching their requirements frameworks from waterfall processes towards agile approaches like Scrum. Additionally he is an conversant trainer for IREB CPRE FL, Visual Facilitation and Agile Requirements.

• Applying IREB RE practices in an agile environment

Edward van Deursen has over 25 years of experience in ICT-projects. He started as programmer and tester, later specialized in quality assurance. In the last few years he specialized in security. He, for among other things, is responsible for the development of the security services within SYSQA B.V. He also elicitated security requirements in different project.

• Building in security instead of testing it in

Jan Jaap Cannegieter has over 20 years of experience in ICT. Jan Jaap started as tester, specialized in Quality Assurance and has over 12 years of experience in requirements elicitation, requirements validation and requirements management. Jan Jaap is the co-author of two well sold Dutch books about requirements: ‘Succes met de requirements’ and ‘Grip op requirements’. He is also very active in the Dutch IREB community and Supporting Member of IREB.

• Building in security instead of testing it in

Albert Tort is the Research&Innovation Solutions Lead in Sogeti Spain. During the last years, he has been working as Quality Assurance and Software Control & Testing specialist in several projects for customers in different sectors (banking, airlines, insurance, procurement, etc.). Furthermore, he has been the lead of research&innovation projects developed at Sogeti. He was the winner of the “Capgemini-Sogeti Testing Innovation Awards 2015” for the submission of the best individual entry "Recover: Reverse Modeling and Up-To-Date Evolution of Functional Requirements in Alignment with Tests. He is also a member of the SogetiLabs community.

Previously, he served as a professor and researcher at the Services and Information Systems Engineering Department of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-Barcelona Tech. As a member of the Information Modeling and Processing (MPI) research group, he focused his research on conceptual modeling, software engineering methodologies, OMG standards, knowledge management, requirements engineering, service science, semantic web and software quality assurance. Currently, he is also the coordinator of the postgraduate degree in Software Quality Assurance of the School of Professional & Executive Development of the Technical University Of Catalunya (BarcelonaTech).

He obtained his Computer Science degree in 2008 and he received his M.Sc. in Computing in 2009. In 2012 he presented the PhD thesis “Testing and Test-Driven Development of Conceptual Schemas”. He is the author of several publications in software engineering journals and conferences.

• KCycle: Knowledge-Based & Agile Software Quality Assurance
• The Recover Approach

Johan Zandhuis is Product manager at SYSQA BV, an organisation specialised in quality assurance in IT. The themes ‘creating value with IT’ and ‘getting grip on IT’ play a constant role when he’s doing the job. “Why are we doing this” is a question he likes to ask. Besides other publications Johan is co-author of the Dutch book ‘Grip op requirements’ based on the IREB syllabus. Also he is one of the initiators for the Dutch translation of the IREB-dictionary and the IREB foundation syllabus. Contact: jzandhuis@sysqa.nl

• Poor requirements?

Brett Bicknell is an engineer at Critical Software Technologies and has played a key role in a number of formal methods initiatives, including the FP7 ADVANCE project. His software engineering experience encompasses varying levels of criticality and verification and validation activities. His previous work includes embedded systems, solutions for data acquisition and analysis, and a number of European-funded R&D ventures. He holds a BSc degree in Physics.

• Advance
• Rigorous Verification

Karim Kanso has worked within the field of formal methods and software engineering for many years, on various projects in the domains of transportation and aerospace. He has received a PhD in theoretical computer science, and is actively interested in the question of how requirement engineering can be applied to new disciplines, such as autonomous system engineering? He is currently working on the ADVANCE programme at Critical Software Technologies.

• Advance
• Rigorous Verification

Brett Bicknell is an engineer at Critical Software Technologies and has played a key role in a number of formal methods initiatives, including the FP7 ADVANCE project. His software engineering experience encompasses varying levels of criticality and verification and validation activities. His previous work includes embedded systems, solutions for data acquisition and analysis, and a number of European-funded R&D ventures. He holds a BSc degree in Physics.

• Rigorous Verification

Karim Kanso has worked within the field of formal methods and software engineering for many years, on various projects in the domains of transportation and aerospace. He has received a PhD in theoretical computer science, and is actively interested in the question of how requirement engineering can be applied to new disciplines, such as autonomous system engineering? He is currently working on the ADVANCE programme at Critical Software Technologies.

• Rigorous Verification

Daniel McLeod has worked on a variety of imaging sensor systems in the Airborne, Land and Naval domains. His previous work includes algorithm development, system design, requirements analysis and verification and project management. He is currently working within the smart energy domain on a Low Voltage monitoring system and a system for automated control of low voltage transformers in response to customer demand and distributed generation.

• Rigorous Verification

Dr. Michael Jastram is an expert model-based systems engineering (MBSE), with a focus on requirements. He has over 20 years experience in software development and requirements engineering, which he regularly shares as author and public speaker. Amongst other things, he publishes weekly updates on Systems Engineering Trends [German] and monthly updates on Requirements Engineering [English].

Michael is a leader in open source requirements management, being project lead of the Eclipse Requirements Modeling Framework. He is also a strong advocate of open standard and actively contributes to the OMG Requirements Interchange Format (ReqIF).

Today, he is founder and principal systems engineer of Formal Mind GmbH, a service provider in Open Systems Engineering.

You can connect digitally with Michael via his Blog [en] | Blog [de] | Twitter | LinkedIn | Xing.

• What is a Useful Perspective in Considering Requirements Engineering Relative to Systems Engineering?
• Modeling Requirements with Constraints
• Open Up

Harry M. Sneed has a Master’s Degree in Information Sciences from the University of Maryland, 1969. He has been working in the IT field since 1967 when he started as a FORTRAN programmer for the US Navy Department. He migrated to Germany in 1971 and worked first for the Federal University Administration and then for Siemens in the database area. In 1978 he set up the first commercial software test laboratory in Budapest. There he developed the first German requirements engineering tool SoftSpec in 1982. That tool was used to document the requirements in many large German organizations, including BMW, Bertelsmann, Thyssen Steel and the German Railways. That tool was used not only to collect and store the requirements on the mainframe, but also to check the completeness and consistency of the requirements, as well as to generate a system design.

At the end of the 1980’s Sneed moved over to the field of reverse and reengineering and became involved in projects throughout Europe. In 2009 he received the Stevens Award from the IEEE Computer Society for his pioneering achievements in that field. He conducts courses at two technical colleges and two universities. He has published over 400 technical articles and written 23 books on the subjects of software testing, maintenance, migration and measurement. His work in requirement engineering is mainly in connection with reverse engineering, change management and test, three areas in which he still works as freelance consultant.

• Tracing Change Requests
• Automated Quality Assurance

Dr. Kim Lauenroth is Chief Requirements Engineer and leads a competence centre for requirements engineering at adesso AG.

He has over 10 years of experience in software and requirements engineering in different domains. He regularly speaks at internal conferences in the topic of RE. Within IREB, he is involved in the development of the advanced level module Elicitation & Consolidation.

Kim received his PhD in the field of requirements engineering from the University of Duisburg-Essen and studied computer science, business administration and psychology at the University of Dortmund.

• The goal is to solve the problem
• What does it mean?

For more than twenty years, Rainer Grau has accompanied companies on their way enterprise agility. He supports companies in their efforts to continuously develop and create sustainable value for customers and employees. For him, it is particularly exciting to find out which methods, techniques and approaches are suitable for scaling agility and building the right product and the right service for the customer. Business analysis and requirements engineering are two essential disciplines in this context, which also generate high value in an agile setup - even if perhaps lived completely differently compared to a classic project approach.

Rainer's background of experience in business agility is based on his consulting work with companies from various industries. Stages of his professional life include Distinguished Consultant and Partner at Zühlke Engineering, Head of Business Development at digitec Galaxus, responsible for courses at universities of applied sciences on the topic of agility, founder of the Swiss Agile Leaders Circle, founder of Denkplan Verein and active involvement in communities around agility, business analysis and requirements engineering.

If there is still time left, Rainer Grau likes to spend it with his family, doing sports, playing his guitar and reading novels.

• Mission Possible
• Innovation Arena