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J.UCS Special Issue on Requirements Engineering
The Light Control Case Study
Egon Börger (Università di Pisa, Italy)
boerger@di.unipi.it
Reinhard Gotzhein (Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany)
gotzhein@informatik.uni-kl.de
Abstract: In 1998, Egon Börger (Università di Pisa,
Italy), Dave Parnas (McMaster University, Canada), Bärbel Hörger
(Daimler-Chrysler Research, Germany) and Dieter Rombach (Universität
Kaiserslautern, Germany) planned a Dagstuhl seminar on "Requirements
Capture/Documentation/Validation" with the goal to bring together
software engineering researchers from academia and software engineers from
industry to critically compare the practice and research for capturing,
documenting and validating software requirements. The seminar took place
from June 14-18 in 1999, and was focused on the industrial strength of
the used methods and on their relevance for the production of large software.
It was guided by a case study from building automation1
, which had been proposed to the participants for an illustration of their
contribution to the seminar [2].
The Dagstuhl seminar was a success. It highlighted the strengths and
short-comings of major requirements engineering approaches that are used
in practice, and it did this in rather concrete terms, related to the numerous
elaborations of the case study. This motivated us to make this work available
in revised and reviewed form. During the summer of 1999, the case study
problem description was repeatedly revised to take the questions and comments
of the Dagstuhl participants into account. The revisions were made in cooperation
with Rolf Merz and Jürgen Schäfer from the Electrical Engineering
Department of the University of Kaiserslautern, who were acting as customers.
In the fall of 1999, the resulting, still informal, problem description
of a Light Control system, which is included in this volume, has been sent
out with an international call for papers, soliciting the application of
requirements engineering methods, techniques, and tools to this case study.
Until the deadline, all authors had the opportunity to clarify open questions
on the informal problem description
electronically with the customer. The
questions together with the answers were collected into a glossary, and
made available to all authors through the Web. In January 2000, we started
a review process of the 13 submitted papers. In accordance with the J.UCS
rules, each paper was reviewed by at least three reviewers, one of them
chosen from submitting authors to take advantage of their detailed knowledge
of the Light Control Case Study.
In the spring of 2000, the authors of the accepted papers were asked
to thoroughly revise once more their original submissions, following the
criticism formulated in the reviews. The final outcome of this work appears
in this Special Issue, together with an evaluation of a questionnaire that
the authors were asked to fill in as basis for a synopsis of the different
solutions. The papers in this issue present the main features of the solutions
and refer, for a complete documentation, to the respective websites, which
the reader is invited to consult. We hope that this J.UCS Special Issue
will help the reader to evaluate by himself the strengths and shortcomings
of the methods for capturing, documenting and validating informal requirements
included in this Volume.
1This case study has been extracted by the
Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering from a larger
case study that has been developed by the Sonderforschungsbereich 501 "Development
of Large Systems with Generic Methods" at the University of Kaiserslautern
[1].
References
[1] R. L. Feldmann, J. Münch, S. Queins, S.
Vorwieger, G. Zimmermann: Baselining a Domain-Specific Software Development
Process, Technical Report SFB501 TR-02/99, University of Kaiserslautern,
1999
[2] E. Börger, B. Hörger, D. L. Parnas,
D. Rombach (Editors): Requirements Capture, Documentation, and Validation,
Dagstuhl-Seminar-Report 242 (99241), 1999
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