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

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

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

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.
 

• Interview with John Mylopoulos
• Requirements Elicitation (ReqElic) in My Company

David Gilbert has worked in various operational and strategic Digital Design roles since 2007. Previously, he completed his studies as Diploma Mediamanager at the Wiesbaden University of Applied Sciences.

Until 2015, he worked for various design agencies such as Scholz & Volkmer, Pixelpark, Mutabor or SinnerSchrader. The projects he has worked in have received over 25 international and national design awards. - Since 2015 he is working in the IT department of the Deutsche Bahn Group, where he holds the role of Chief Architect User Experience at the intersection of classic system-oriented and user-oriented software conception.

From 2011 - 2016, he was a lecturer in UX Design at the RheinMain University of Applied Sciences, and has published various contributions to the topics of strategic UX design and digital design.

In addition to his engagement within the "Digital Design" working group, he is chairing the Bitkom "Digital Design" working group as well as he is a member of the "Designforum Digital Experience" of the German Design Council.

• Mastering Business Requirements

Dirk Röder has been working in software engineering since 1992. At DB Systel GmbH, he has been chief software architect since 2007, taking care of the employees involved in IT conception.

Since 2010, he has played a leading role in setting up and further developing the internal training program for the conceptual design of software. He has been driving the integration of UX design and classic software engineering since 2015. He is currently working on the conversion of concept work to agile implementation and new production models such as DevOps.

• Mastering Business Requirements

Grigory Grin is a Chief Software Architect at Axinom – software supplier for Media- and In-Flight Entertainment solutions based in Germany and Estonia.
Grigory studied mathematics and graduated from the Ural State University in Russia in 1995. During his 25 years career on the software development field, Grigory had responsibilities in a broad range of roles – Development, Architecture, Business Analysis, Project Management. His main strengths are in alignment between the customer needs and contractors technical capabilities and solution portfolio to deliver the highest business value.
As a practitioner, Grigory has successfully led multiple multi-million euro projects for world-known brands in the aerospace industry with significant challenges on the field of Requirements Engineering.

• When the rubber hits the road

Jason Hansen obtained a BS in Chemical Engineering from Michigan Tech. He left the work force in 2005 to focus on raising an adopted special needs daughter. In 2015, he decided to return to school and obtained his AAAS in Network Admin. He is working as a tutor at GRCC while pursuing a Master’s Degree in Computer Software Engineering at GVSU.

• Challenges in the elicitation and determination of precise requirements from animal stakeholders

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

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

Dr.-Ing. Birgit Demuth has over 20 years experience as researcher and educator in software engineering.
Amongst other lectures, she teaches students in requirements engineering.

Her interests are how to apply model-based techniques in the continuous software life cycle.
In a large-scale software project course, she coaches students and student tutors to elicit and model (often real)
user requirements before they start to implement.

• Tracing Change Requests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jens Schirpenbach has been working as a consultant in the area of Product Lifecycle management for more than 12 years focusing on operations transformation in the area of Engineering and Services. He worked as a solution architect and project manager for diverse projects, essentially in the automotive, aerospace and manufacturing industry. He managed a team for PLM at a major European consultancy. After eleven years in consulting he founded P&PM Solutions & Consulting.
He has a joint master degree in mechanical Engineering and business administration of the University of Darmstadt, Germany.

• Opportunities & Approaches

Cristina Palomares is a PhD student in the Software Engineering for Information Systems Research Group (GESSI) at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). Her PhD thesis deals about the construction, use and evolution of software requirement patterns for the reuse of requirements knoledge.

She has published several papers and presented posters and demos in requirements engineering conferences like in IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE) and the International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ). She is the coordinator of developers of the PABRE System for supporting requirements reuse.

• What is the Relevance of Requirements Engineering Research to Practitioners?
• Requirements Reuse

Dr. Carme Quer is associate professor in the Service and Information System Engineering department (ESSI) at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). She is member of the Software Engineering for Information Systems Research Group (GESSI) at the UPC. Her main research lines are requirements engineering and software quality.

She has published several papers in requirements engineering conferences like in the IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE) and the International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ). She was General Chair of the Workshop on Requirements Engineering (WER) held in 2008.

• What is the Relevance of Requirements Engineering Research to Practitioners?
• Requirements Reuse

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?
• Requirements Reuse