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• 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.

• Call For Papers: REV'10. Submissions are open for the 5th International Workshop on Visualization in Requirements Engineering at RE'10!

• Call For Papers: MERE'10. Submissions are open for the 4th International Workshop on Multimedia Requirements Engineering at RE'10!

• Call For Papers: REET'10. Submissions are open for the Requirements Engineering Education and Training Workshop at RE'10!

• The latest newsletter, RQ54, is now out! Head to the newsletter section of our website for the latest requirements focused news, events, articles and sources

Featured Articles:

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!

Building Myself a Kayak: Some Lessons for Requirements and Software Engineering (Part I)

 In part I of this article, I explained my determination to build a traditional Inuit skin on frame kayak last summer. With no prior knowledge of either kayak building or woodworking, I became an apprentice to an expert in a small kayak-building workshop on an island in Maine. As I went through the process, I recognised so many lessons for requirements and software engineering that I felt compelled to share my top twenty observations with others. In Part I, I discussed the role of communication, measurement, modelling, visualisation and architecture in kayak building. I also highlighted the issues of resourcing and the pivotal role of a keen eye. In Part II, I discuss eight more observations ... and you get to find out the outcome.

1. Use the right tool for the job

While it was possible to use a small number of tools when building our kayaks, life was made far easier when the right tool for the particular job was used. The difference in size and angle of the plane that was used could make a task last either ten minutes or take two hours. A metal rasp could equally halve the time of a sandpapering task. A hot knife would seal the cut edges of the fabric at the same time as it was cut, thereby completing two tasks in one. Curved sewing needles would make a directional pull of thread around difficult wooden corners both feasible and easy, as evident in Figure 13. The smart kayak builder not only has a well-equipped boathouse and toolbox, but knows exactly what to use and when, and they can interchange between the use of these tools seamlessly....

By Olly Gotel - Click to read the full article!