User Requirements and System Requirements

In software, we often talk about user requirements and system requirements. Most people know the terms: users give you user requirements, designers work from system requirements. The terms have entered our lingua franca. However, in my experience, people - stakeholders, analysts, and designers - often fail to differentiate the roles of these two kinds of requirements. Unfortunately, treating user and system requirements as the same thing can create problems for projects. In this column I unpack some problems I've observed with user requirements and system requirements and explore what we can do about them.     

Requirements and Specification Exemplars

Specification exemplars are familiar to most software engineering researchers. For instance, many will have encountered the well known library and lift problem statements, and will have seen one or more published specifications. Exemplars may serve several purposes: to drive and communicate individual research advances; to establish research agendas and to compare and contrast alternative approaches; and, ultimately, to lead to advances in software development practices.Because of their prevalence in the literature, exemplars are worth critical study. In this paper we consider the purposes that exemplars may serve, and explore the incompatibilities inherent in trying to serve several of them at once. Researchers should therefore be clear about what successfully handling an exemplar demonstrates. We go on to examine the use of exemplars not only for writing specifications (an end product of requirements engineering), but also for the requirements engineering process itself. In particular, requirements for good requirements exemplars are suggested and ways of obtaining such exemplars are discussed.     

The interface between computers and psychology: Toward a psychology of computerization

The computer has made itself felt virtually everywhere in modern life, including psychology. In fact, the literature that is concerned with computer-related issues indicates that there are four areas where the computing and psychological sciences have come to interact with each other on a consistent basis. The major dimensions of this computer-psychology interface are: artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, clinical/educational applications, and the question of the impact of computers on human identity. A phenomenology of the computer-related psychological literature indicates that each of these four areas includes a specific group of core issues, key research studies, and leading authors. This article describes the major issue that characterizes each dimension of the computer-psychology interface, and argues that it is time for psychology to formally recognize the importance of this emerging psychology of computerization.     

Cognitive psychology

An expert system has been developed to aid in the analysis of carbon-13 nuclear magnetic resonance (¹³C nmr) spectra of complex organic molecules. This system uses a knowledge base of rules relating substructural and spectral features: these rules are derived automatically from data for known structures. Such rules have a number of current, practical applications relating to spectrum prediction. They also constitute the basis of a method for the structural interpretation of ¹³C spectral data of unknown compounds. This method, which is basically a constraint refinement search, provides for a much more complete analysis of such data than any approach currently utilized.     

A Requirements Engineering Methodology for Real-Time Processing Requirements

This paper describes a methodology for the generation of software requirements for large, real-time unmanned weapons systems. It describes what needs to be done, how to evaluate the intermediate products, and how to use automated aids to improve the quality of the product. An example is provided to illustrate the methodology steps and their products and the benefits. The results of some experimental applications are summarized.     

Requirements Management

We have all read the dire statistics where most IS-related projects are late, over budget, lacking in functionality, or never delivered. Requirements drive the development process. Effective requirements management helps control quality, cost, organization, and schedule, thus substantially improving the odds of a successful project. This issue's look at requirements planning begins with a thorough overview of the requirements management process.     

Emotional Requirements

Emotional requirements must contain at least two elements: the game designer's intent (that is, the target emotional state) and the means by which the game designer expects (requires) the production team to induce that emotional state in the player. We can consider an emotional state such as happiness as universal, but the way you induce happiness isn't. Emotional requirements need context: classic pratfalls from vaudevillian theater can induce gales of laughter in a viewer who also feels horror at seeing a loved one fall. Unanticipated interactions between what the player sees, hears, and feels before or during the game can also affect the player's emotional response to stimulus, which is further conditioned by the individual's personality, culture, and life experiences.     

Requirements and GitHub Issues: An Automated Approach for Quality Requirements Classification

Programming and Computer Software - In the development of quality software, critical decisions related to planning, estimating, and managing resources are bound to the correct and timely...     

Software and House Requirements Engineering: Lessons Learned in Combating Requirements Creep

Anyone who has built or remodelled a house and has developed or enhanced software must have noticed the similarity of these activities. This paper examines these two processes from the points of view of budgeting, scheduling, and requirements creep. It is admitted from the start that some of the argument and conclusions are based on popular perceptions and personal observation over small populations, that is, the houses the author and some close friends have remodelled and built and software projects in which the author has participated as an analyst, designer, programmer, or consultant.     

人工心理与人工情感

介绍了人工心理与人工情感的定义、研究意义、关键支撑技术和主要研究内容与应用领域,分析了国内外相关研究的进展.人工情感主要是情感计算方面的研究,人工心理包括人工情感、人工意识以及认知与情绪的人工数字化技术.人工情感是人工心理的一个主要研究内容.最后提出了该研究领域未来需要解决的若干科学问题及几点建议.指出了研究情感形式化方法和开发人类心理数字化技术并实现重大应用,是人工心理和人工情感研究者未来的主要任务.     

需求管理工具在需求工程中的作用

给出了软件需求工程的概念并阐述了软件需求工程的主要组成内容,对市场流行的软件需求管理工具的特点和作用进行了介绍和比较,并对软件需求管理工具的发展方向作出预测。     

Requirements and the business case

We hear a lot about the necessity of finding the right requirements. But how do we know which requirements are the right ones? How do we choose which requirements to spend time on and which ones to put in the waiting room? And how can we determine whether we're missing any of the "right" requirements? The answer to all these questions lies in having a well-understood reason for doing the project along with quantified expectations of its costs and benefits. We often refer to this collection of knowledge as the business case. A business case provides a mechanism for justifying and guiding a project. The business case is the basis for deciding the most profitable investment of effort. It's the project driver.     

应用要求与计算机体系结构

本文将从数据通讯、并行计算与人工智能等三方面讨论应用要求对计算机体系结构正在产生的影响.     

Requirements capture and IS methodologies

Abstract. The problem of not using a methodological approach during the development process is well known and its implications for organizations clearly identified. This paper reports on a survey of information systems practice carried out to provide recent evidence about the use of development methodologies by different organizations. Data from 72 projects was obtained through a mail survey within the UK. The focus of the analysis is on the discovery of potential relationships between the use of methodologies for requirements capture and analysis and the characteristics of the projects     

Requirements engineering and industrial uptake

Although there have been a number of research projects in requirements engineering, industrial uptake from these projects has rarely lived up to expectations. To investigate possible explanations for this and what potential mechanisms there may be for promoting industrial uptake of current and future requirement engineering R&;D projects, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission organised and held a workshop in Brussels. This paper describes the results of this workshop and outlines follow-up support activities.     

Tracing Requirements Errors to Problems in the Requirements Engineering Process

A case study of requirements engineering practice is reported. The application, a decision support system for the Greek Ministry of Health, was investigated by studying the process of requirements analysis through to design and implementation. A usability analysis was then conducted on the designed system with the users. Several usability problems were discovered, and interviews uncovered further problems with the system that could be attributed to failure in requirements engineering (RE). Even though requirements were explicitly stated and the system was an evolution from an existing legacy system, functionality was defective and usability was poor. The client’s prime concern for redeveloping the system was to improve usability; unfortunately communications problems in the RE process meant that the developers did not appreciate this. The implications for RE methods and understanding the RE process are discussed.