Papers by Birgit Penzenstadler
Requirements Engineering (RE) has grown from its humble beginnings to embrace a wide variety of t... more Requirements Engineering (RE) has grown from its humble beginnings to embrace a wide variety of techniques, drawn from many disciplines, and the diversity of tasks currently performed under the label of RE has grown beyond that encom-passed by software development. We briefly review how RE has evolved and observe that RE is now a collection of best practices for pragmatic, outcome-focused critical thinking – applicable to any domain. We discuss an alternative perspective on, and de-scription of, the discipline of RE and advocate for the evolution of RE toward a discipline that supports the application of RE prac-tice to any domain. We call upon RE practitioners to proactively engage in alternative domains and call upon researchers that adopt practices from other domains to actively engage with their inspiring domains. For both, we ask that they report upon their experience so that we can continue to expand RE frontiers.
Pattern-based guideline to empirically analyse software development processes
ABSTRACT Little is yet known about how to qualitatively analyse development processes to steer th... more ABSTRACT Little is yet known about how to qualitatively analyse development processes to steer their further optimisation. Thereby, companies are often left to the expertise of third parties when performing such an analysis. Aim: We aim at elaborating a way of empirically analysing development processes on basis of 9 empirical studies we performed at our research group. Method: We analyse 9 empirical studies for commonalities in their research objectives, research methodologies, cases, and methods used to infer a set of research methodology patterns. Results: We discover and discuss three methodology patterns, which we embed into a first experience-based guideline to conduct qualitative analyses of development processes. Conclusion: Our guideline is inferred from a series of successful studies. However, since qualitative analyses always will depend on many aspects that cannot be standardised, we lay with this contribution a first, but fundamental step to be further discussed, evaluated, and extended.
Mobile application development operates in a market characterized by low barriers to market entry... more Mobile application development operates in a market characterized by low barriers to market entry, short time-to-market and the need for rapid return on investment, making it suitable for exploiting the potential of open innovation. Technology-driven entrepreneurs often diverge from the standard practice of antecedent business case analysis. We report here upon the result of a six-month empirical investigation of this question, performed within an incubator setting, and our analysis of the results indicates a reasonable probability of success, at least for ventures with access to experienced requirements practitioners. Our results indicate that incorporating RE techniques from the beginning of the venture has the potential to reduce the risks associated with the missing business case analysis. The field observations have also identified requirements engineering challenges in this domain worthy of further investigation. In particular, the relative impact of business requirements upon the technology requirements is extreme and requirements methods must respond not only to agile development processes but function even when a pivot (an instantaneous and complete change) in business focus occurs.
—A body of knowledge is a term used to represent the complete set of concepts, terms and activiti... more —A body of knowledge is a term used to represent the complete set of concepts, terms and activities that make up a professional domain. It encompasses the core teachings, skills and research in a field or industry. So far, the discipline of RE is lacking an official Requirements Engineering Body of Knowledge (REBoK). This working session brings together researchers and practitioners to elaborate the goals, requirements and constraints for a REBoK that shall serve as commonly agreed basis for developing a draft over the following months.
[Motivation:] The requirements engineering (RE) research community is aware of the importance of ... more [Motivation:] The requirements engineering (RE) research community is aware of the importance of performing feasibility studies before starting requirements elicitation. Unfortunately, projects still frequently fail to achieve commercial success, responsibility is often unknown , and requirements engineers may be deemed responsible for mistakes made by others. [Problem:] There is neither empirical evidence available from a post-mortem risk analysis for projects that performed adequate RE but commercially failed nor guidance for requirements engineers on validating a business case analysis to mitigate this risk. [Principal idea:] By performing a post-mortem analysis of software development projects that failed to achieve commercial success, we investigate the root causes for the failures and, in most cases, trace the causes back to business case issues. We identify risk areas and provide practical due diligence guidance to the practitioner. [Contribution:] This exploratory case study performs an in-depth review of a detailed post-mortem analysis of three software development projects performed over a 2.5 year period. Each of the analyzed projects failed to make the expected transition to commercialization despite using appropriate RE techniques and achieving satisfactory deliverables. The analysis identifies risk factors that the RE practitioner should consider and we provide a checklist for RE practitioners to use when checking for these risks in an antecedent business case as part of their due diligence. A low-cost commercial viability assessment technique, employing Fermi approximation, is provided to equip the RE practitioner with a risk mitigation tool in the absence of business analyst resources.
Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference extended abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts - CHI EA '12, 2012
Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic w... more Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques may engage expertise from different disciplines, and potentially increase productivity. This paper presents a model of massively distributed collaborative authorship of academic papers. This model, developed by a collective of thirty authors, identifies key tools and techniques that would be necessary or useful to the writing process. The process of collaboratively writing this paper was used to discover, negotiate, and document issues in massively authored scholarship. Our work provides the first extensive discussion of the experiential aspects of large-scale collaborative research.
An Assessment Technique for Sustainability: Applying the IMAGINE Approach to Software Systems
From Requirements Engineering to Green Requirements Engineering
Green in Software Engineering, 2015
REMsES D-3.3: Ausarbeitung des Leitfadens auf Abstraktionsstufe Hardware/Software
Bridging communities
interactions, 2015
Sustainability and Requirements: A Manifesto
IEEE Software, 2015
Collaborations and Code Reviews
IEEE Software, 2015
Supporting Physicians by RE4S: Evaluating Requirements Engineering for Sustainability in the Medical Domain
2015 IEEE/ACM 4th International Workshop on Green and Sustainable Software, 2015
REMsES D-3.2: Ausarbeitung des Leitfadens auf Abstraktionsstufe Funktionsgruppen
RE4SuSy: Requirements Engineering for Sustainable Systems
REMsES D2.2: Grobes Produktmodell inklusive der Abstraktionsebenen zur Strukturierung und Modellierung von Anforderungen
2013 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, Sep 7, 2013
Systems whose functionality and services span over multiple, interconnected application domains h... more Systems whose functionality and services span over multiple, interconnected application domains have become known as cyber-physical system (CPS) and currently receive much attention in research and practice. So far, CPS still come with a variety of development-process-related and technical challenges. These challenges include the interaction between the different domain-specific systems and possible conflicts between their requirements, as well as the choice of appropriate modelling concepts.
Second International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Sustainable Systems (RE4SuSy)
Requirements Engineering as a Surrogate for Business Case Analysis in a Mobile Applications Startup Context
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Papers by Birgit Penzenstadler