Articles

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

Gareth is an experienced business analyst and product owner who has been working in the telecoms and other industries for longer than he’d like to be specific about. He has been an active member of IREB for some years and is a co-author and examiner within the RE@Agile working group. He lives and works in Germany having successfully escaped from a small, slightly uncooperative island.

• Splitting Requirements at Scale
• RE in Agile Projects: Survey Results
• RE in Agile Projects: a Survey
• How agile can Requirements Engineers really be?

Howard Podeswa is a thought leader in the intersection of agile and business analysis. For over twenty years, he has been helping large organizations optimize their analysis and planning practices for agile software development approaches. He has authored a number of books that have become staple references for practitioners, most recently: The Agile Guide to Business Analysis and Planning: From Strategic Plan to Continuous Value Delivery - How Product Owners and Business Analysts (BAs) maximize the value of the product developed by the team, by integrating BA competencies with agile methodologies (Addison-Wesley Professional; 1st edition, 2021). Other works include UML for the IT Business Analyst (2009), and The Business Analyst’s Handbook (2008).

At Noble Inc., he has provided agile and business analysis services to clients worldwide, including the International Standards Organization (ISO), Moody’s, the Mayo Clinic, TELUS, TD Bank, LabCorp, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Mawer Investment Management Ltd., Bell Nexia, and REI Coop. He is currently advising IIBA on its Nimble initiative.

To contact Howard for in-house and public training and coaching services, please email howardpodeswa@nobleinc.ca or find him on LinkedIn @howardpodeswa

• Why Your Agile Organization Needs a High-Performing Requirements Engineering Competency
• The Business Case for Agile Business Analysis
• Five Questions

Thorsten von Ramsch is Director Engineering at QAULITEST Group. He is an IREB Certified Requirements Engineer, ISTQB Certified Tester Full Advanced Level, ASQF Project Manager, Professional Scrum Master and iNTCCM Certified Professional for Configuration Management. His focus is on the banking and insurance sector, which he advises in the areas of requirements elicitation, test management and test analysis.

• Classical requirements and test analysis a discontinued model?

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

Suzanne Robertson is having a stellar career in information technology and systems engineering. Suzanne is a pioneer in adapting ideas from other domains for automated solutions. She has collaborated in workshops using experts from fields as diverse as modern music, visualization, and cookery. Ideas from these domains were adapted to make major breakthroughs in creative ideas for domains ranging from air traffic control to local government. She is co-author of the best-selling Mastering the Requirements Process, among other books and courses. She is co-creator of the Volere requirements techniques. She was the founding editor of the Requirements Column in IEEE Software.

• Integrating Business Events into your Agile Framework
• How Will It Work?

As a principal and founder of The Atlantic Systems Guild, James Robertson is known for his work in implementing systems engineering principles that link business specialists with solution specialists. James is a consultant, lecturer, author, project leader whose area of concern is the requirements for software, and the contribution that good business analysis makes to successful projects. James is co-author of 5 books that have been influential in the business analysis world. His training as an architect has led to his work on good design principles and to his focus on how innovation can be integrated with business analysis.

• Integrating Business Events into your Agile Framework
• How Will It Work?

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.

• Inputs to requirements engineering in agile projects

Nuno Ferreira is currently the head of research at i2S Insurance Knowledge, invited professor at ISEP of Porto's Polytechnique Institute and researcher at ALGORITMI research center of Minho’s University in Portugal. He holds a PhD in Software Engineering. He has a strong background in software engineering, project management and process management. His re-search interests are requirements elicitation, process-to-product transitions, logical architectures derivation, and process maturity models.

• Inputs to requirements engineering in agile projects

Ricardo J. Machado is a full professor of Information Systems Engineering and Technology in the Dept. of Information Systems at the University of Minho (UMinho), School of Engineering. Within the Information Systems Engineering domain, his primary research interests are in modelling and requirements for systems analysis and design and in process and project management life-cycles. He has supervised 50 completed PhD and MSc theses in these areas. He has published over 150 scientific publications and 4 industrial patents, and has acted as coordinator (PI) and senior researcher of over 50 R&D projects. Currently, at UMinho he is the vice-rector for institutional development, the director of the ALGORITMI Research Centre, the scientific coordinator of the EPMQ Laboratory at the CCG/ZGDV Institute, the director of the Doctoral Program in Advanced Engineering Systems for Industry, and member of the Board of the UM-Cities Platform.

• Inputs to requirements engineering in agile projects

Till-J. Faßold is Expert Strategic Planning at 1&1, Germany. In this role – besides other responsibilities – he coaches professionals from various departments and is responsible for the requirements engineering processes. Till-J. Faßold hold a master’s degree in information management from the University of Koblenz and is certified to the IREB CPRE Expert Level.

• Requirements Engineering and Domain Knowledge

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 Job Offers

Maya Daneva, PhD, is Senior Member of Scientific Staff in the Services and Cybersecurity group at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. Her research interests are requirements engineering for large systems, security requirements engineering, requirements-based project estimation, user feedback analytics, and empirical research methods. Maya has a strong international exposure having spent two years of her career in Germany at the University of Saarbruecken and in the IDS Scheer, and 9 years as a business process analyst for SAP Enterprise Recourse Planning projects at TELUS Corporation, Canada’s second largest telecommunication company.

• Requirements Engineering in Job Offers

Chong Wang is an assistant professor at Wuhan University. She has over 10 years of work experience in research and university teaching. Her research interests include requirements engineering, software engineering, and service computing.

• Requirements Engineering in Job Offers

Nelly Condori-Fernandez is an assistant professor at the Universidade da Coruna (Spain) and research associate of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands). Her research focuses on topics related to quality requirements prioritization and sustainability. She has published 85 articles in indexed journals and ranked conferences. Besides, she has been involved in several European projects.

• Requirements Engineering in Job Offers

Suzanne Robertson is having a stellar career in information technology and systems engineering. Suzanne is a pioneer in adapting ideas from other domains for automated solutions. She has collaborated in workshops using experts from fields as diverse as modern music, visualization, and cookery. Ideas from these domains were adapted to make major breakthroughs in creative ideas for domains ranging from air traffic control to local government. She is co-author of the best-selling Mastering the Requirements Process, among other books and courses. She is co-creator of the Volere requirements techniques. She was the founding editor of the Requirements Column in IEEE Software.

• Integrating Business Events into your Agile Framework
• How Will It Work?

As a principal and founder of The Atlantic Systems Guild, James Robertson is known for his work in implementing systems engineering principles that link business specialists with solution specialists. James is a consultant, lecturer, author, project leader whose area of concern is the requirements for software, and the contribution that good business analysis makes to successful projects. James is co-author of 5 books that have been influential in the business analysis world. His training as an architect has led to his work on good design principles and to his focus on how innovation can be integrated with business analysis.

• Integrating Business Events into your Agile Framework
• How Will It Work?

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

Priyank Arora is a Senior Business Analyst working in the digital IT space for 12+ years. He is a CBAP certified professional with a Core Credential in Business Analytics from Harvard Business School. He works on large scale digital transformation projects for the world’s leading travel group, where he helped to transition the requirement engineering processes from traditional to Agile working methodologies. He was also involved with a machine learning initiative within his organisation and is a data science enthusiast with an interest in applying analytical thinking and decision automation for business growth.

• Data Science – the expanding frontier for Business Analysts

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

Thijmen works as IT architect at Kommuninvest acting as technical lead for its digitalization initiative and growing CI/CD and Agile practice in the company. His work on the mini-QAW started in his role as researcher at ABB, where he worked on software architectures with colleagues around the globe. He authored publications at leading international software conferences, receiving two best paper awards. Thijmen graduated cum-laude in software engineering from VU University in the Netherlands and Malardalen University in Sweden.

• Discover Quality Requirements with the Mini-QAW

Michael Keeling is a software engineer at LendingHome and the author of Design It! From Programmer to Software Architect. In his career so far, he has worked on a variety of interesting software systems including IBM Watson, enterprise search applications, financial platforms, and Navy combat systems. Michael has a master’s degree in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the College of William and Mary. Contact him via Twitter @michaelkeeling or his website, https://www.neverletdown.net

• Discover Quality Requirements with the Mini-QAW

Will Chaparro is a software development manager in IBM’s Watson Group. He spent over 5 years designing and building complex enterprise search solutions as a managing consultant. Prior to IBM he spent 11 years as a software engineer. He has a BS in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh.

• Discover Quality Requirements with the Mini-QAW

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

Howard Podeswa is a thought leader in the intersection of agile and business analysis. For over twenty years, he has been helping large organizations optimize their analysis and planning practices for agile software development approaches. He has authored a number of books that have become staple references for practitioners, most recently: The Agile Guide to Business Analysis and Planning: From Strategic Plan to Continuous Value Delivery - How Product Owners and Business Analysts (BAs) maximize the value of the product developed by the team, by integrating BA competencies with agile methodologies (Addison-Wesley Professional; 1st edition, 2021). Other works include UML for the IT Business Analyst (2009), and The Business Analyst’s Handbook (2008).

At Noble Inc., he has provided agile and business analysis services to clients worldwide, including the International Standards Organization (ISO), Moody’s, the Mayo Clinic, TELUS, TD Bank, LabCorp, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Mawer Investment Management Ltd., Bell Nexia, and REI Coop. He is currently advising IIBA on its Nimble initiative.

To contact Howard for in-house and public training and coaching services, please email howardpodeswa@nobleinc.ca or find him on LinkedIn @howardpodeswa

• Why Your Agile Organization Needs a High-Performing Requirements Engineering Competency
• The Business Case for Agile Business Analysis
• Five Questions

Joy Beatty is a VP at Seilevel, a professional services company whose mission is to define software that customers love to use. Joy implements new methodologies that improve the requirements process. Her team provides assessments, mentoring, training and consulting services for F1000 companies.

Joy is actively involved as a leader in the requirements community. She was a co-author of PMI’s Business Analysis for Practitioners: A Practice Guide, as well as being on the core team for the IIBA’s Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK) version 3. She is also a contributing author to “The Guide to Business Analysis” which “Includes the Standard for Business Analysis” by PMI. She co-authored Visual Models for Software Requirements with Anthony Chen and Software Requirements, 3rd Edition with Karl Wiegers.

• Making “agiLE” Work
• Project Value Delivered

Candase is a Product Manager at Seilevel. As a trainer and a practitioner, she helps ensure her clients’ software projects deliver the most return on investment, and helps define the problems their projects are trying to solve. She has provided training for business analysts in F300 companies, as well as assisting in the development of Seilevel training material. She also provided editorial contributions to both Visual Models for Software Requirements and Software Requirements, 3rd Edition.

• Making “agiLE” Work
• Project Value Delivered

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

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

Marie Garnier is an associate professor in the English Department at the Université Toulouse 2 – Jean Jaurès (Toulouse, France). She holds a PhD in English linguistics on the topic of automatic grammar checking. Her research interests include the interface between syntax and lexical semantics in English, the definition and processing of errors produced by English learners, and linguistics-driven NLP. She can be reached at mgarnier@univ-tlse2.fr.

• Detecting Incoherent Requirements in Large Documents
• Improving the Use of English in Requirements
• LELIE

Patrick Saint-Dizier, PhD, is a senior researcher in Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence at CNRS, IRIT, Toulouse, France. He is specialized in discourse and semantic analysis. He has developed several national and European projects dedicated to logic programming, argumentation and technical text analysis. He is the author of several conference and journal articles and of 11 books. Besides foundational research, he has a long practice and experience of research and development activities. Contact: stdizier@irit.fr

• Detecting Incoherent Requirements in Large Documents
• Improving the Use of English in Requirements
• LELIE

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

Eduard C. Groen is engineering psychologist. His fascination with the rapid rise of man-machine interfaces and other changes that affect society inspires him to contribute with technologies that optimally make use of the potential that these developments bring. As Fraunhofer IESE operates at the intersection of science and industry, he is involved in a variety of projects, while leading the development of the “Crowd-based Requirements Engineering” approach.

• How Requirements Engineering can benefit from crowds

Matthias Koch studied computer science with a focus on software engineering. Since 2012, he is employed as engineer at Fraunhofer IESE and mainly addresses the topics of requirements engineering and business analysis. In this context, he was involved in research projects on the pre-project and requirements definition phase, case studies and product evaluations. In research as well as industry projects, he regularly acts as requirements responsible, conducts workshops with customers and provides consulting.

• How Requirements Engineering can benefit from crowds

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

Dr. Christine Grimm works for SAP as Senior Researcher in large scale, publicly funded projects. Formerly, she has been employed as a consultant implementing Enterprise Resource Planning Systems in Europe.
She holds a Master of Science in Management as well as a PhD in Science, Technology and Innovation Studies from the University of Edinburgh. She lives with her family in Zürich.

• Requirements Engineering in Research Projects: Food for Thought

Onur Görkem Özcan is a young professional with multidisciplinary background in management and engineering. He currently works as Project Manager at Credit Suisse, based in Zürich. He holds a BSc in Electronics Engineering from Sabanci University and MSc in Management, Technology and Economics from ETH Zürich. During his masters studies he worked at SAP Research as an intern and thesis student, researching requirements engineering practices in research projects.

• Requirements Engineering in Research Projects: Food for Thought

Gareth is an experienced business analyst and product owner who has been working in the telecoms and other industries for longer than he’d like to be specific about. He has been an active member of IREB for some years and is a co-author and examiner within the RE@Agile working group. He lives and works in Germany having successfully escaped from a small, slightly uncooperative island.

• Splitting Requirements at Scale
• RE in Agile Projects: Survey Results
• RE in Agile Projects: a Survey
• How agile can Requirements Engineers really be?

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

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.
 

• Stable? Fragile? Agile! Attractive but reasonable

Human capital is not merely a phrase we do not live, it is one of the most important goods we have. With regards to my function as a Project coordinator, my aspiration is to target the optimized commitment of the individualized abilities, strengths and talents of the SOPHISTs. In addition, I am permanently looking for new employees for the team, taking care of our trainees, development of the staff and thus I am constantly supporting our executives. I benefit from my studies of Social Sciences, my multi-year experience in Human Resources and my sense for the positive.

• Stable? Fragile? Agile! Attractive but reasonable

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

Rodolphe Arthaud currently works as an expert consultant for Inspearit, particularly in the area of process improvement.
Early adopter of Object Oriented Analysis and OMT, he led the development of OMT-, SDL- and UML-based products, participated actively in the definition of SDL2000 (ITU), UML 1.4, and UML 2.0 (OMG).
He was involved in the deployment of Requirements Engineering for a whole aircraft program, and since then, in various other domains — industry, IT for banks or insurance companies…

• An “agile” lifecycle for requirements
• Is requirements engineering still needed in agile development approaches?

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

Luisa Mich is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Trento, Italy. Her research interests include requirements engineering, creativity and web strategies. She is an author of more than 150 papers.
 

• Requirements Elicitation (ReqElic) in My Company

Victoria Sakhnini is an adjunct lecturer at the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Her research includes empirically validating the effectiveness of a new technique to enhance requirements-elicitation creativity and effectively teaching computer science principles.
 

• Requirements Elicitation (ReqElic) in My Company

Daniel M. Berry got his B.S. in Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, USA in 1969 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA in 1974. He was on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA from 1972 until 1987. He was in the Computer Science Faculty at the Technion, Haifa, Israel from 1987 until 1999. From 1990 until 1994, he worked for half of each year at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, where he was part of a group that built CMU's Master of Software Engineering program. During the 1998-1999 academic year, he visited the Computer Systems Group at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. In 1999, Berry moved to what is now the the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Between 2008 and 2013, Berry held an Industrial Research Chair in Requirements Engineering sponsored by Scotia Bank and the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). Prof. Berry's current research interests are software engineering in general, and requirements engineering and electronic publishing in the specific.
 

• Requirements Elicitation (ReqElic) in My Company

Rodolphe Arthaud currently works as an expert consultant for Inspearit, particularly in the area of process improvement.
Early adopter of Object Oriented Analysis and OMT, he led the development of OMT-, SDL- and UML-based products, participated actively in the definition of SDL2000 (ITU), UML 1.4, and UML 2.0 (OMG).
He was involved in the deployment of Requirements Engineering for a whole aircraft program, and since then, in various other domains — industry, IT for banks or insurance companies…

• An “agile” lifecycle for requirements
• Is requirements engineering still needed in agile development approaches?

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

Gareth is an experienced business analyst and product owner who has been working in the telecoms and other industries for longer than he’d like to be specific about. He has been an active member of IREB for some years and is a co-author and examiner within the RE@Agile working group. He lives and works in Germany having successfully escaped from a small, slightly uncooperative island.

• Splitting Requirements at Scale
• RE in Agile Projects: Survey Results
• RE in Agile Projects: a Survey
• How agile can Requirements Engineers really be?

Patrick Saint-Dizier, PhD, is a senior researcher in Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence at CNRS, IRIT, Toulouse, France. He is specialized in discourse and semantic analysis. He has developed several national and European projects dedicated to logic programming, argumentation and technical text analysis. He is the author of several conference and journal articles and of 11 books. Besides foundational research, he has a long practice and experience of research and development activities. Contact: stdizier@irit.fr

• LELIE

Juyeon Kang has a PhD in Computational Linguistics (syntax and formal semantics) from the University Paris-Sorbonne. She is a R&D Engineer at Prometil (Toulouse) and associate researcher at IRIT-CNRS. She is specialized in argumentation mining and technical document authoring. She has been involved in a number of international projects. Her research results have been published in various international conferences and journals.

• LELIE

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

After studying physics in Germany and New Zealand, Gunnar Harde worked as software engineer, later as IT consultant and project manager for IT and business consultancies and research institutes. Since 2007 he is responsible for the development of several IT systems of the Group Quality Assurance at Volkswagen and shapes the cooperation between IT and business department strategically and methodically. Harde is Certified Scrum Product Owner and expert in agile management.

• Managing the Invisible
• Agility and Obligation
• Agility and Obligation

Sven is senior consultant|trainer at inspearit|cibit academy. He has worked on aligning business and IT at various organisations for more than 20 years. Both at profit and non-profit organisations Sven has helped teams and individuals to reach improvements in processes and results. He masters and applies several methods and techniques. Sven has helped many persons to achieve more with the right use of requirements engineering techniques and with agile ideas and frameworks. He loves to share his experience with others.

• Requirements Engineering and Agile

Dr. Carl Friedrich Kress works as Senior Consultant and Innovation Manager in Germany. He has written many articles about the scientific background of software cost estimation methods and metrics. His work helps IT project managers to reliably estimate and plan software development projects. Working in an agile environment he’s also experienced in creating precise requirements for agile developers.

• Catching the worm

After studying physics in Germany and New Zealand, Gunnar Harde worked as software engineer, later as IT consultant and project manager for IT and business consultancies and research institutes. Since 2007 he is responsible for the development of several IT systems of the Group Quality Assurance at Volkswagen and shapes the cooperation between IT and business department strategically and methodically. Harde is Certified Scrum Product Owner and expert in agile management.

• Managing the Invisible
• Agility and Obligation
• Agility and Obligation

Ellen Gottesdiener is an internationally recognized leader in the convergence of agile + requirements + product management + project management. Ellen is founder and principal of EBG Consulting, which helps organizations adapt how they collaborate to improve business outcomes.

Ellen’s passion is helping people use modern product requirements practices to build valued products and great teams. She provides training, coaching, and facilitates discovery and planning workshops across diverse industries, including education, energy, financial services, pharmaceutical, software, transportation, and telecommunications.

Ellen is a world-renowned writer, speaker, and presenter. Her most recent book, co-authored with Mary Gorman, is Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning and Analysis. Ellen is author of two other acclaimed books: Requirements by Collaboration and The Software Requirements Memory Jogger.

You can connect digitally with Ellen via her Blog | Twitter | Newsletter | LinkedIn 

• Agile Product Ownership

Ulf Ackermann currently works as a Requirements Engineer in the B2B Industry Commerce division of T-Systems Multimedia Solutions GmbH. His degree in commercial information technology at the Dresden University of Applied Sciences helps him to capture customer requirements from both business and technical perspectives. He has more than 7 years’ experience in large scale E-Commerce projects and specializes in the area of project procedure models. He states: “Structuring a project from the few known variables to produce an appealing offering for the customer is the most challenging and in the end rewarding part of my daily work.”

• Customized Agile RE Process

Dirk Fritsch is a Principal Consultant in the requirements division at QA Systems GmbH.  He has over 10 years of experience in business analysis, process modelling and requirements engineering and has worked on customer projects from every sector. He collaborated in research projects at the University of Duisburg/Essen and the University of Leipzig, addressing recurring issues from customer projects to improve existing methods using new technologies and solutions. In his current work he focuses on training and coaching for requirements management using classical and agile methods.

• Customized Agile RE Process

Gareth is an experienced business analyst and product owner who has been working in the telecoms and other industries for longer than he’d like to be specific about. He has been an active member of IREB for some years and is a co-author and examiner within the RE@Agile working group. He lives and works in Germany having successfully escaped from a small, slightly uncooperative island.

• Splitting Requirements at Scale
• RE in Agile Projects: Survey Results
• RE in Agile Projects: a Survey
• How agile can Requirements Engineers really be?

Joy Beatty is a VP at Seilevel, a professional services company whose mission is to define software that customers love to use. Joy implements new methodologies that improve the requirements process. Her team provides assessments, mentoring, training and consulting services for F1000 companies.

Joy is actively involved as a leader in the requirements community. She was a co-author of PMI’s Business Analysis for Practitioners: A Practice Guide, as well as being on the core team for the IIBA’s Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK) version 3. She is also a contributing author to “The Guide to Business Analysis” which “Includes the Standard for Business Analysis” by PMI. She co-authored Visual Models for Software Requirements with Anthony Chen and Software Requirements, 3rd Edition with Karl Wiegers.

• Making “agiLE” Work
• Project Value Delivered

Candase is a Product Manager at Seilevel. As a trainer and a practitioner, she helps ensure her clients’ software projects deliver the most return on investment, and helps define the problems their projects are trying to solve. She has provided training for business analysts in F300 companies, as well as assisting in the development of Seilevel training material. She also provided editorial contributions to both Visual Models for Software Requirements and Software Requirements, 3rd Edition.

• Making “agiLE” Work
• Project Value Delivered

Having finished her diploma in quantum optics Maria-Therese Teichmann couldn’t resist meeting the complex challenges of Information Technology. For fifteen years she has been working at Software Daten Service GmbH as a business analyst and quality manager in banking software. Her focus there are long term quality decisions, which nowadays are more and more difficult to argue against business interests. Besides the business job she loves to work at the University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien, was part of a gender project and offers classes in software evolution, relational databases and Software Engineering topics.

• Gender Studies

Eva Gebetsroither works as a Senior Technical Translator in the localisation team of Software Daten Service GmbH. Apart from translations and terminology management she is responsible for language quality assurance. Within the framework of her field of activity there are numerous connections to Requirements Engineering. As an expert in the area of languages and communication she focuses on the role of natural language in Requirements Engineering.

• Gender Studies

After graduating in Communication Science with a focus on public relations and corporate communications in Salzburg and Shanghai, Corinna Unterfurtner finished the MBA in General Management with a focus on coaching, training and education. Corinna collected practical experience as a project manager at the University of Salzburg. Now she is responsible for project and requirements management, the training of new customers and support requests at an ERP business software for SME. Additionally she supports customers in process optimization and workflow design with the help of HELIUM V.

• Gender Studies

Alexandra Kreuzeder is the project manager of "ditact women's IT summer studies", that is part of the ICT&S Center of the University of Salzburg. She graduated at the University of Vienna in Sociology in 1997. Focusing on the processes of socialization, she started in 1998 a year-long research project concerning the gender socialization processes of girls and boys in kinder gardens in Copenhagen, Denmark. Returning to Salzburg in August 1999 she worked in the field of Internet Technology and was project manager of the ditact_women's IT summer university. From March 2011-November 2012 she took a time out to build up her own company "Salzburg Coaching" that offers communication and stress reduction training. Since last year she has shared the management of the ditact summer university with Carina Bachinger from the ICT&S Center.

• Gender Studies

Alexander Rachmann advises companies on the linking business and IT. His strong interdisciplinary knowledge of business administration and computer science enables him to work as an ideal Requirements Engineer, Business Analyst, or System Analyst. He has worked in industries such as e-commerce, healthcare, IT security, and software development. He holds a doctorate degree in economics, master's degrees in computer science and information science and a diploma in business computer science.

• Product Owner in Scrum

Jesko Schneider worked as a consultant with a focus on Business Analysis, Requirements Management and Usability Engineering. He built up consulting services for Requirements Engineering and Usability Engineering in an international consulting company. His industry focus lies on telecommunications. He is a well-known trainer for Certified Professional for Requirements Engineering from the IREB. In his role as Requirements Engineer, Business Analyst, System Analyst or Product Owner, he is always the linkage between business and IT. He holds a degree in media informatics.

• Product Owner in Scrum

Frank Engel looks back on over 10 years’ experience in project management and Requirements Engineering. Prior to his time as a Partner of the Anforderungsfabrik, he was responsible for an international consulting company as Unit Manager. Topic of his business unit was Requirements Engineering and Management. His role in projects is Product Owner, Project Manager and Requirements Engineer. He studied business information systems. Always linking business and IT!

• Product Owner in Scrum

The International Requirements Engineering Board (IREB) e.V. has joined forces with the vision to create an international, professional basis for Requirements Engineering (RE) and to improve the knowledge in RE and its application, in order to give this discipline the importance and the orientation that corresponds to its added value for the industry.

The IREB is the developer and the holder of the CPRE (Certified Professional for Requirements Engineering) certification scheme, which stands for an elaborated three level certification concept.

Website: www.ireb.org

• Building the bridge

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?

Erik van Veenendaal (www.erikvanveenendaal.nl) is a leading international consultant and trainer, and a widely recognized expert in the area of software testing and quality management.

He is the founder of Improve Quality Services BV (www.improveqs.nl). He holds the EuroSTAR record, winning the best tutorial award three times! In 2007 he received the European Testing Excellence Award for his contribution to the testing profession over the years. He has been working as a test manager and consultant in various domains for more than 20 years. He has written numerous papers and a number of books, including “Practical Risk-Based Testing: The PRISMA Approach” and “ISTQB Foundations of Software Testing”. He is one of the core developers of the TMap testing methodology and a participant in working parties of the International Requirements Engineering Board (IREB). Erik is also a former part-time senior lecturer at the Eindhoven University of Technology, vice-president of the International Software Testing Qualifications Board (2005–2009) and currently board member of the TMMi Foundation.

You can follow Erik on twitter via @ErikvVeenendaal.

• RE for Testers

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