Requirements engineering and electronic publishing

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Requirements engineering (RE) is gathering information from stakeholders of a client organization to produce a coherent requirements specification (RS) for the system the client desires. This work's goal is to develop methods that help producing this RS. Requirements elicitation is gathering information about the system to be built from any source, the client, users, organization at work, interviews, video recordings, organization policy documents, vision documents, RFPs, etc. Requirements analysis is refining this information into a RS by deriving what is possible from the information and validating it with the client and users. My focus is on understanding the RE process to know what works and what does not, and armed with this understanding, to propose and validate methods and tools that improve RE's effectiveness: 1. understanding the various roles in the RE process: The participants in RE are at least the customer, users, requirements engineers, and system developers. Unless each performs her role properly, the RE process can lead to a system that meets no stakeholder's real requirements even if it meets all specified requirements. 2. dealing with requirements that are expressed in natural language (NL): Even if there is a formal mathematical specification, an overwhelming majority of all documents involved in RE are in NL, which is inherently ambiguous. An ambiguous NL requirements specification can lead to incorrect implementations. Moreover, each ambiguity requires asking stakeholders to resolve the ambiguity. Another area of research for me is electronic publishing. Development will be done in Multi-Lingual Formatting and Dynamic PostScript Fonts as case studies in RE.