Articles

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

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

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

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

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

Manon Penning has a broad background in the fields of IT and education. She is an educational specialist, requirements engineer, quality analyst and trainer currently employed by Improve Quality Services, a provider of consultancy and training. Via Improve Quality Services she has been working for several Dutch companies over the past few years.

• Biased Toddlers
• The Genius Toddler Challenge

Manon Penning has a broad background in the fields of IT and education. She is an educational specialist, requirements engineer, quality analyst and trainer currently employed by Improve Quality Services, a provider of consultancy and training. Via Improve Quality Services she has been working for several Dutch companies over the past few years.

• Biased Toddlers
• The Genius Toddler Challenge

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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?

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

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

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

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

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?

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?

Andreas is consultant and trainer at SOPHIST GmbH and is specialized in object-oriented and linguistic methods in requirements engineering. His assignments include methods of linguistic analysis as well as of conceptual models. Moreover, Andreas deals with the generation of acceptance criteria and test cases in the context of requirements engineering. He also occupies the position of controller of the innovation projects at SOPHIST and is engaged in the training of new employees.

• Is there something missing?

Born and raised in France where she completed her studies in IT Project Management, Margaux worked two years as consultant in Project Management, both in France and in Germany. Through the different projects she worked in, she noticed the critical importance of good requirements engineering practices and thus chose to specialize in this domain. Over the last two years, she worked as a consultant and trainer in Requirements Engineering in Germany, making it her mission to support her clients to create and improve their RE processes. Now back in France, she wishes to put her experiences to the service of local companies.

• Is there something missing?

Andreas Maier studied Computational Linguistics, Language Science and Technology and Philosophy at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. From November 2008 to April 2018, he worked as scientific assistant at Fraunhofer IESE, where he focused on the elicitation and the automatic analysis of user requirements provided in natural language. In May 2019, he finished his PhD in computer science, where he investigated difficulties in the identification and specification of hedonic quality in user requirements and developed possible solutions for the mitigation of these difficulties.

• ReqInspector

Simon Darting studied applied computer science with focus on communication at the University of Applied Sciences in Worms, Germany. Subsequent to his studies he started working as a researcher at Fraunhofer IESE in 2012, where he focused on requirements- and systems engineering within large-scale projects. In 2017 he completed his Master's degree in "Software Engineering for Embedded Systems" at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. Since December 2018, he has been employed at BASF SE in Advanced Business Analytics with a focus on predictive maintenance.

• ReqInspector

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

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?

Cary Bryczek leads the Jama team as the Principal Solutions Architect for our highly regulated customers in the Aerospace and Defense and Medical Device industries. Her role includes creating collaborative systems engineering solutions within Jama's software that increases stakeholder involvement and reduces decision making time. Her background in systems engineering from working on a wide variety of programs in defense, intelligence, aerospace, and healthcare lend her a broad perspective on approaches to requirements engineering for large and small organizations.

With over 15 years of experience as a solutions engineer, Cary has worked with companies such as Lockheed Martin, Medtronic, PTC, Defense Intelligence Agency, Abbott Labs, NASA, Food and Drug Administration and is a participating member of INCOSE, AAMI and IEEE.

• What is a Useful Perspective in Considering Requirements Engineering Relative to Systems Engineering?

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

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

Ariè Avnur is a veteran software developer, manager and executive, with over 40 years of experience developing software of various types, from real-time embedded and control systems through enterprise, web applications, to health IT systems. Ariè accompanied software engineering methodologies and requirements engineering since the 70’s, published papers and developed tools for the trade. Recently he was involved in the introduction and development of RE practice for Scrum projects in a major European healthcare company. Arie’s current interests include the application of RE and development methods for better software development, healthcare IT and Internet of Things platforms.

• A Finite State Machine Model for Requirements Engineering