EventMar2010
From RESG
The RESG Goals Day
Date
Wednesday 24th March 2010
Venue
Room C2.07, University of Westminster, 115 New Cavendish Street, London W1W 6UW MAP
Nearest tube stations are Oxford Circus (Central, Bakerloo, Victoria), Warren St (Victoria, Northern), Great Portland St (Circle, Hammersmith & City, Metropolitan)
Details
A goal is something that a stakeholder wants to achieve, whether that is a function or a desired quality. Goals are basic descriptions of stakeholders' intentions, and imply their key requirements. But goals are permitted to be neither fully achievable nor measurable, unlike requirements which must be both. Goals may conflict, whereas requirements must not. Therefore, goals must be translated into realistic, measurable requirements.
Goals are thus fundamental to requirements engineering, but they are handled very unevenly in industry. This one-day event combines a tutorial on the essentials of goal modelling with a seminar of talks on how to use goals from leading experts in industry and research. The day concludes with a panel discussion.
Programme
9:00 Goals Tutorial, Part 1
Ian Alexander (Scenario Plus) & Ljerka Beus-Dukic (University of Westminster)
- Overview of approaches to goal modelling
- Theories including i* and KAOS
- Team exercise on goals
10:30 Coffee
11:00 Goals Tutorial, Part 2
- Simple practical approaches
- Integrating goal modelling with other requirements techniques
- Team exercise on obstacles & threats
12:30 Lunch
13:30 i* at City University James Lockerbie (City University)
14:00 Relating Goals and Architecture During System Evolution Emmanuel Letier (UCL)
14:30 Goal Structured Notation (GSN) and Satisfaction Arguments Phil Wilkinson (Rolls-Royce)
15:00 Tea
15:30 Using the Design Rationale Editor (DRed) Gareth Armstrong (Rolls-Royce)
16:00 Goals for Adaptive Systems Pete Sawyer (Lancaster University)
16:30 Questions to the Panel
17:00 Close
Speakers
James Lockerbie is a Research Assistant at City University London, and has been employed as a researcher in Requirements Engineering since 2005. James has worked on a range of projects where he has provided expertise on requirements analysis, modelling and specification. His project work includes multi-partner EU-funded research and smaller-scale collaborations in the area of air traffic control. He has also been involved in training and consultancy work. His university work includes teaching requirements techniques as part of the City's requirements engineering module. His main research interest is i* goal modelling and tool development in this area. James is the Secretary of the British Computer Society Requirements Engineering Specialist Group.
Emmanuel Letier is a lecturer in Software Systems Engineering in the Department of Computer Science, University College London. His research interests cover systems requirements engineering, formal specification, software design, and more recently the climate and energy crisis. He has made significant contributions to the KAOS goal modelling framework.
In his talk, he will explain why the modelling and analysis of goals should not be limited to the early stage of a development project. Goals need to be related to the system architecture and the relation between goals and architecture needs to be managed over time as the system evolves. He will outline some of the research challenges and promising directions that are being investigated in this context.
Philip Wilkinson has been employed by Rolls-Royce for over 20 years, during which time he has worked as a systems and safety engineer on a number of different engine control systems.
For a number of years, the safety engineering community has used Goal Structuring Notation (GSN), and the requirements engineering community has used satisfaction arguments. While GSN clearly contains goals, do satisfaction arguments also contain goals? What is the difference between them, what do they have in common and can they be improved? Can we have a common goal-driven approach for safety engineers and requirements engineers, or is the difference too great? Phil will attempt to answer these questions in his talk.
Gareth Armstrong is a design engineer at Rolls-Royce Aerospace, Derby. In the ten years since he joined the company he has been involved in all aspects of the design process on a range of gas turbine projects in the UK, Germany and the USA. He is currently working in the Design Methods team where his responsibilities include developing and promoting improved processes, methods and tools to support all aspects of the company’s engineering activities.
He will speak about DRed (the Decision Rationale editor). DRed is a software tool owned and controlled by Rolls-Royce and developed in collaboration with the Engineering Design Centre at Cambridge University. It was created to provide a simple visual mechanism for capturing the rationale behind complex decisions. It has been shown to clarify thought processes and to improve problem understanding and the generation of ideas. DRed charts can be used to communicate, for example to focus a team on key issues or in a review to obtain formal approval of a decision. They are also used in documentation for archiving to ensure that future projects can re-use the knowledge gained. The software is actively being developed beyond the scope of simply capturing decision rationale to enable designers to capture and display other types of information such as goals, functional models, requirements and quality function deployment (QFD).
Pete Sawyer is Reader in Software Systems Engineering in the Computing Department, Lancaster University. He has over 100 peer reviewed publications and is co-author of a best-selling book on Requirements Engineering (RE) written as a spin-off from the FR4 REAIMS project. One of his current interests is in requirements for self-adaptive systems.
Such systems are beginning to make the transition from research prototype to commercial product, aided by advances in system software technologies such as adaptive middleware. However, software engineering and particularly requirements have so far paid little attention to the particular problems posed by self-adaptive systems. Pete's talk will advocate the use of goal modelling techniques as a means to understand and reason about self-adaptive systems.
Registration
Attendance at this one-day tutorial will cost £65 (+VAT) for BCS members and £75 (+ VAT) for Non-Members. Numbers will be limited so do book early.
To register, please visit the BCS event registration pages:
Please contact Rachel Browning if you have any queries concerning registration:
Rachel Browning MBCS
Specialist Groups
BCS First Floor, Block D, North Star House, North Star Avenue, Swindon SN2 1FA
tel +44(0)1793417416 / fax +44(0)1793417444
rachel.browning@hq.bcs.org.uk
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