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ResourcesThese are resources that we have found useful in our requirements work. By all means make use of them, and by all means please let us know if you have found resources that will be of use to others. The Volere Requirements Specification Template is a guide to writing a requirements document. It suggest ways of writing your requirements, and provides a structure for the document. A survey of requirements engineering tools gives you a review of most of the current tools. John Favaro is a software guru with a good grasp of economics — a subject that is all too rare in our field. He has some interesting things to say at http://www.favaro.net/john/home/essays/index.html. John's site contains lots of other useful stuff. Dan Berry has posted an Ambiguity Handbook. This handbook describes the ambiguity phenomenon from several points of view, including linguistics,
software engineering, and the law. http://se.uwaterloo.ca/~dberry/ #Handbook
Talk to Carol Dekkers at Quality Plus Technologies for advice on how to count function points and use them to help manage requirements.
http://www.qualityplustech.com
ART-SCENE's Scenario Presenter is a new web-based tool that supports stakeholders to walk through scenarios to discover new requirements. It is one component of ART-SCENE, a research prototype that supports scenario-driven systems engineering, from the Centre for HCI Design at City University in London. ART-SCENE automatically generates rich and comprehensive scenarios from enhanced use case descriptions. Stakeholders can then walk through these scenarios using the Scenario Presenter, exploring normal and alternative course events in turn, and documenting new requirements and comments as they go. To use the Presenter for your requirements work, contact Dr Neil Maiden at City University.
The RESCUE (Requirements Engineering with Scenarios for User-Centred Engineering) process was developed by multi-disciplinary researchers at the Centre from HCI Design at City University in London. It integrates applied research and best-practice in human activity modeling, scenario-based requirements engineering using the CREWS-SAVRE approach, system goal modeling with the i* approach, requirements management based on the Volere requirement shell, requirements acquisition using the ACRE framework, and innovative techniques for creative requirements engineering. RESCUE supports a concurrent engineering process in which different modeling and analysis processes take place in parallel. Furthermore the use of creativity workshops encourages requirements and design ideas to be discovered and elaborated together, so that requirements inform high-level design selection, and possible designs restrict and constrain requirements to those that are viable. RESCUE is currently being applied in Eurocontrol and NATS to produce requirement specification for new air traffic management systems. To know more about RESCUE contact Dr Neil Maiden at City University.
Ian Alexander has posted his Use Case toolkit on the Scenarioplus website for free download. This toolkit can be used with DOORS. It allows you to construct complete use case definitions with metrics and automatic linking of included and exception use cases. The summary diagrams are drawn automatically from the defined use cases, actors, and their relationships. There is a short illustrated description on the website. The Automated Requirement Measurement (ARM) tool to be found at
http://satc.gsfc.nasa.gov/tools/arm/index.html
is a plain text analysis tool. It was developed at NASA Goddard Space Flight
Center as an early life cycle tool for assessing requirements. The intention
is to provide measures that can be used by project managers to assess the
quality of a requirements specification document. The tool is not intended
to evaluate the correctness of the specified requirements. It is an aid
to "writing the requirements right", not "writing the right
requirement. Creative Workshops Suzanne Robertson, Atlantic
Systems Guild London and Neil Maiden Head of Human Computer Interface Design
Centre at City University, London conducted a series of creative workshops
for Eurocontrol in Paris. The objective was to generate new
ideas and requirements for air traffic management CORA-2 (Conflict Resolution
Assistant). The first workshop
generated 80 new and innovative design ideas and constraints. We used these
as input to the second workshop and sparked 125 ideas at varying levels
of detail. Then the third workshop added customer value to the ideas and
made the best ones into concrete design solutions. More... CREWS (Cooperative Requirements Engineering with Scenarios) ESPRIT long term research project. http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~cc559/CREWS.html. Alan Davis has updated his very comprehensive list of RE articles at http://www.uccs.edu/~adavis/reqbib.htm Alan also runs the Requirements Managament Place at http://www.RMPLACE.org Alastair Cockburn's Humans and Technology, Salt Lake City, UT.
Web site: http://members.aol.com/acockburn/
. Especially his work on use cases. Alastair also has a recommended book on the subject of use cases. Dorset House Publishing Co.
Dorset House is one of our favourite publihsers. You can
download PDF versions of their Catalog of Books and The Dorset House Quarterly.
You'll find links on their homepage http://www.dorsethouse.com. INCOSE. The International Council on Systems Engineering. Requirements are considered an integral part of systems. Some good stuff at http://www.incose.org/rwg/. See also the requirements management tools survey at http://www.incose.org/tools/tooltax.html ISE/RE (Innovative Software Engineering/Requirements Engineering) itmWEB have a very comprehensive index of CASE tools by category. Some of it is naturally out of date as any such list will be after three minutes, but nevertheless a useful resource. Click here Joel Spolsky's Joel on Software site is worth
a visit. Go to the Complete Archive and look at the article called Painless
Functional Specifications. I would give you the direct link but you
should start at the home page and look at all he has to offer. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/index.html The Journal of Requirements Engineering is worth looking at. This journal is young yet, but shows promise. Karl Wiegers' Process Impact, Fairport, NY. Web: www.processimpact.com
PSARE web site accompanies
the book, Process for System Architecture and Requirements Engineering written by Derek Hatley, Peter Hruschka and the late Imtiaz Pirbhai. The site currently includes an initial customer requirements statement for an online case study and a discussion forum on which you can contribute to the case study and to any other issues relating to the book. The case study will be developed and posted on the web site as the discussion progresses. REAIMS (Requirements Engineering Adaptation and Improvement for Safety and Dependability) RECORD (Requirements Collection Reuse and Documentation) RENOIR (Requirements Engineering Network of International Cooperating
Research Groups) Didar Zowighi's RE-online discussion group about
requirements engineering. To subscribe to the group, send "subscribe
re-online" (without the quotes) in the body of an email message to
majordomo@it.uts.edu.au. The
discussion group used to be called SRE, and has a worldwide collection of
requirements experts discussing topical issues. It is also a great place
to ask for help. Further information for the mailing list can be found here. Requirements Engineering Specialist Group of the British Computer Society and their listing of books, web sites and tools can be found at
http://www.resg.org.uk.
Back issues of their Requirenautics Quarterly are at http://research.ivv.nasa.gov/~steve/resg/ Software Engineering web site at http://www.software-engineer.org
has some good resources. It is aimed at a more general audience than just
requirements. The content of the site is submitted by contributors from
the worldwide software engineering community, and thus has an interesting
diversity. Software Quality Engineering,
long known for its software test and evaluation technology and software
quality programs, is a US agent agent for inhouse offerings of Mastering the Requirements Process seminar. This work is copyright © 1995 - 2003 Atlantic Systems Guild, but may be
adapted for your internal use provided copyright is acknowledged. Please
let us know what you
are using it for. |
