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• The latest newsletter, RQ55, is now out! Head to the newsletter section of our website for the latest requirements focused news, events, articles and sources

• Software Requirements and Design. This book spans the career of Michael Jackson: our patron and one of requirements and software engineering's most important figures.

Featured Articles:

HFS: Human Flesh Search

For a system to produce purposive results, it has to have been specified, designed, and tested against its requirements; it has to be commissioned and deployed prior to use; and it inevitably stays the same until it is deliberately changed, whether by redesign, “maintenance” software coding, or the updating of business rules if table-driven.

Only – all these laws are false, in the case of systems built on social networks and making use of the combined power of the Internet and human capabilities.

The International Council on Systems Engineering, INCOSE, has of course long defined a system as “a construct or collection of different elements that together produce results not obtainable by the elements alone. The elements, or parts, can include people, hardware, software, facilities, policies and documents…” (Eberhardt Rechtin, The Art of Systems Architecting, 2nd Ed., 2000).

It should be no surprise that the “parts” of an aircraft, or a bank, include both people and policies as well as hardware and software: these systems couldn’t work without rules to govern them and people to maintain them.

But these sober, Systems Engineering thoughts pale into insignificance beside the lurid accounts of Human Flesh Search that have appeared recently in the Western press. Western, for HFS stems from China – perhaps the first of many significant innovations from that dynamic economy and its many scientists and engineers. ...

By Ian Alexander - Click to read the full article!

Book Review: Michael Jackson Retrospective

This nicely produced retrospective has been put together by "colleagues and friends" of Michael Jackson (not the pop singer) to celebrate his extraordinary pioneering career in software engineering, and in particular on requirements. It follows a special "Michael" event at ICSE 2009 (in Vancouver).

Half the book consists as you'd expect of enjoyable samples of Jackson's own writings. These include the sharply funny "Getting It Wrong - A Cautionary Tale". It's about how Fred the programmer makes a continuingly hideous mess of a simple file summary report through lack of correct program structure, complete with stepwise worked example. Each time the program goes wrong ("All went well for the next 17 months.") Jackson wryly shows us what Fred must have been thinking, the agony of debugging

 "With the help of the systems programmer, Fred went through the object code hexadecimal character by hexadecimal character, and related it to the source code. The job took only nine hours, which they did in one marathon stretch, thus earning a bonus from their appreciative management. But the result was to prove that the object code was a perfectly reasonable compilation of the up-to-date cobol source text!"

and the steady build-up of tricks and kludges to get the program, somehow, to work. It's pure genius....

By Ian Alexander - Click to read the full article!