Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
Requirements documents for software projects in industry, agile or not, typically follow a plan defined in a 1998 IEEE standard (IEEE 830-1998 [1]), “reaffirmed” in 2009. IEEE 830 has the merit of simplicity, as it fits in 37 pages of which just a few (competently) describe basic requirements concepts and less than 10 are devoted to … Read more
In the software engineering family requirements engineering is in my experience the poor cousin, lagging behind the progress of other parts (such as design). I have been devoting attention to the topic in recent months and am completing a book on the topic. Tomorrow (Thursday), I will be covering some of the material in a … Read more
Science progresses through people taking advantage of others’ insights and inventions. One of the conditions that makes the game possible is that you acknowledge what you take. For the originator, it is rewarding to see one’s ideas reused, but frustrating when that happens without acknowledgment, especially when you are yourself punctilious about citing your own … Read more
I am giving a “distinguished lecture” at the University of California, Santa Barbara, January 10 (Friday, tomorrow) at 14. The title is A Comprehensive Approach to Requirements Engineering. The abstract and rest of the information are here. I will spend the last few minutes of the talk discussing other current developments (verification, concurrency).
Software engineering has improved a lot in the past couple of decades, but there remains an area where the old doomsday style of starting a software engineering paper (software crisis, everything is rotten…) still fits: requirements engineering. Just see the chasm between textbook advice and the practice of most projects. I have written on requirements … Read more
Some important concepts of software engineering, established over the years, are not widely known in the community. One use of this blog is to provide tutorials on such overlooked ideas. An earlier article covered one pertaining to project management: the Shortest Possible Schedule property . Here is another, this time in the area of requirements engineering, … Read more
The best way to make software requirements precise is to use one of the available “formal” approaches. Many have been proposed; I am not aware of a general survey published so far. Over the past two years, we have been working on a comprehensive survey of the use of formality in requirements, of which we … Read more
Once you have learned the benefits of formally expressing requirements, you keep noticing potential ambiguities and other deficiencies [1] in everyday language. Most such cases are only worth a passing smile, but here’s one that perhaps can serve to illustrate a point with business analysts in your next requirements engineering workshop or with students in your … Read more
Book announcement: Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly Bertrand Meyer Springer, 2014 (just appeared) Book page: here. Amazon page: here. Publisher’s page: here A few years ago I became fascinated with agile methods: with the unique insights they include; with the obvious exaggerations and plainly wrong advice they also promote; and perhaps most … Read more