Joerg Doerr

Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering | IESE · Extended Institute Management

The farming domain has seen a tremendous shift towards digital solutions. However, capturing farmers' requirements regarding Digital Farming (DF) technology remains a difficult task due to domain-specific challenges. Farmers form a diverse and international crowd of practitioners who use a common pool of agricultural products and services, which me...

The digital transformation strongly affects the agricultural domain. Still, there is a lot of potential for optimization in many work and business processes. In the current agricultural digital ecosystem, numerous isolated, often non-interoperable solutions exist. In this chapter, we motivate the need and added value of an “Agricultural Data Space”...

Nach öffentlicher Ausschreibung durch die Bundesanstalt für Landwirtschaft und Ernährung (BLE) – im Auftrag des Bundesministeriums für Ernährung und Landwirtschaft (BMEL) – wurde das Fraunhofer-Institut für Experimentelles Software Engineering IESE in Kaiserslautern zusammen mit seinen Unterauftragnehmern – Kuratorium für Technik und Bauwesen in de...

Privacy becomes more and more important for users of digital services. Recent studies show that users are concerned about having too little control over their personal data. However, if users get more possibilities for self-determining the privacy effecting their personal data, it must be guaranteed that the resulting privacy requirements are corre...

[Context and motivation] In order to stay competitive in the Digital Transformation era, many organizations are engaging in innovative software ecosystems (SES). However, there is a lack of specific methods for tackling SES engineering challenges. [Question/problem] This paper presents a Requirements Engineering (RE) decision framework and a proces...

In recent years, we have witnessed profound changes in business and society. The use of digital technologies has brought about disruptive changes in every domain, changes that are widely known as the "digital transformation." Systems are growing increasingly interconnected and complex with cyberphysical systems even sensing and actuating in the phy...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an area of growing importance as more and more computing capability becomes embedded into real world objects and environments. But at the same time IoT is just one component of a widespread shift towards a new age of federation, combining with other trends such as cloud computing, blockchain and automation to create...

We are now living in the era of digital transformation: Innovative and digital business models are transforming the global business world and society. However, the authors of this paper have perceived barriers that prevent requirements engineers from contributing properly to the development of the software systems that underpin the digital transfor...

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects a variety of small devices, via gateways, to the cloud. Use-cases often require IoT devices to run logic that is not predetermined before deployment, and that must be updated during the lifetime of the device. In this paper, we explore the potential of over-the-air scripting and updatable runtime containers hos...

The systems of industrial automation management (IAM) are in the domain of information systems. IAM systems have software components that support manufacturing processes. The operational parts of IAM coordinate highly plug-compatible hardware devices. These functions lead to process and topology variability, which result in development and reuse ch...

The technical or organizational enforcement of security policies is a necessity for modern enterprises such as DATEV eG. However, security policy specification is challenging,especially for users inexperienced in security. The provision of project- and domain-specific security policy templates can sup-port users in the specification of security pol...

Many systems in the industrial automation domain include information systems. They manage manufacturing processes and control numerous distributed hardware and software components. In current practice, the development and reuse of such systems is costly and time-consuming, due to the variability of systems' topology and processes. Up to now, produc...

Stakeholders who are highly distributed form a large, heterogeneous online group, the so-called “crowd”. The rise of mobile, social and cloud apps has led to a stark increase in crowd-based settings. Traditional requirements engineering (RE) techniques face scalability issues and require the co-presence of stakeholders and engineers, which cannot b...

[Context & motivation] Requirements prioritization is typically applied in order to determine which requirements or features should be included in a certain release or implemented first. While most requirements prioritization approaches prescribe a fixed set of prioritization criteria that have to be assessed during the prioritization process, ther...

In this paper, we summarise REFSQ 2013 - the 19th International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality - which took place in Essen, Germany on April 8-11 2013.

This paper discusses some essential reasons why socio-technical systems do not get the acceptance by end-users that is typically needed for a successful usage of the systems. One major prerequisite to achieve sufficient acceptance is to ensure a specific treatment of end-users, and stakeholders in general during the requirements engineering phase....

Project retrospectives can be powerful tools for project teams to collectively identify communication gaps and practices to improve for future projects. However, even if project members take the time for a retrospective, it can be hard to correctly remember and jointly discuss past events in a constructive way. Fact-based timelines that visualize a...

[Context & motivation] Requirements are often elicited in hierarchies, with more fine-grained requirements being derived from abstract ones. This approach is typically used in business-process-driven requirements engineering (BPRE) where fine-grained system functions are derived from business activities contained in business processes. [Question/pr...

Die Diskussion über Big Data ist viel mehr als die klassische Analyse von Internetdaten. Im Zeitalter von Industrie 4.0 und dem Aufkommen von Cyber-Physical Systems und schlussendlich hochgradig integrierten Smart Ecosystems geht es darum, einen tatsächlich greifbaren Mehrwert aus einem schier unendlich großen Datenschatz zu schaffen. Dabei gilt es...

Am 28.+29.11.2013 trafen sich 32 Teilnehmer/innen zum Jahrestreffen der Fachgruppe Requirements Engineering, dieses Mal an der Technischen Universität Ilmenau. Wir bedanken uns ganz herzlich bei Patrick Mäder und allen weiteren Personen der TU Ilmenau, die das Treffen so erfolgreich und freundlich vorbereitet und begleitet haben.

Warehouse management systems (WMS) play a critical role in supply chains and large production processes. WMS pose two crucial challenges for variability modeling and management: Firstly, the physical configuration of each warehouse differs significantly. Numerous different electronic devices like controllers, sensors, and motors are used to automat...

We are living in an information society. For us it is normal to access relevant information almost immediately. In our world, information systems play an important role in our private as well as in our professional lives. When selecting or developing such systems, especially complex ones, we need to understand and model the requirements on these sy...

Project retrospectives can be a powerful tool for process improvement through obtaining new insights. However pure experience-based reflections may lead to incorrect conclusions. Our method, evidence-based timeline retrospectives (EBTR), mitigates this risk by providing a pre-generated timeline that visualises project history based on evidence rath...

In existing usage control policy frameworks, policies consisting of authorizations and obligations are specified at a low level of abstraction. As a consequence, these policy specifications become long and complex since they reference many technical elements of the system such as operating system calls or web-service invocations. Due to this comple...

Software requirements specifications play a crucial role in software development projects. Especially in large projects, these specifications serve as a source of communication and information for a variety of roles involved in downstream activities like architecture, design, and testing. This vision paper argues that in order to create high-qualit...

Software requirements specifications (SRS) serve as an important source of information for software architects with regard to deriving suitable architectural design decisions. However, from a software architect's viewpoint, using these documents efficiently and effectively is often difficult. One could attribute these observations to the fact that...

In recent years, empirical studies have gained more and more importance in requirements engineering. Especially studies aimed at investigating the efficiency and effectiveness of software requirements specification techniques have been reported frequently. In fact, objective and quantifiable data collected during experimental investigations can be...

Requirements Engineering (RE) is a socially constructed activity and as such it includes the creation, development, assessment and communication of innovative ideas. An idea can take the form of a thought related either to the analysis of a problem, or to the search of a solution to this problem, and it can be concrete or abstract. Creative thinkin...

Business processes need to be agile and flexible to help organizations stay competitive. For this purpose, SOA promises the reuse of already existing information system functionality for enabling enterprises to change the business processes more quickly. However, many promises made by SOA authors have not found their way into practice, because meth...

Business contexts represent a big challenge for software development, specifically in terms of finding a balance between business goals and user goals. The users of a business application are forced to use it as part of their jobs. It would be beneficial to their motivation, their health, and their performance if the software they use were not only...

Providing high-quality software within budget is a goal pursued by most software companies. Incomplete requirements specifications can have an adverse effect on this goal and thus on a company's competitiveness. Several empirical studies have investigated the effects of requirements engineering methods on the completeness of a specification. In ord...

[Context and motivation]PLEvo-Scoping is a method intended to help Product Line (PL) scoping teams anticipate emergent features and distinguish unstable from stable features, with the aim of preparing their PL for likely future adaptation needs. [Question/problem]This paper describes a quasi-experiment performed to characterize PLEvo-Scoping in ter...

This ICB Research Report constitutes the proceedings of the following four workshops which were held on Tuesday, 29th June 2010 as part of the Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ) conference 2010 at the University of Duisburg-Essen. First Workshop on Creativity in Requirements Engineering (CreaRE). First International W...

Public authorities fund large research projects with the goal to develop and advance innovative products, solutions as well as methodologies. Due to the large volume and the typical mixture of industrial and research partners in the consortia, these projects offer a strong basis for delivering highly innovative results that further the state of the...

Early orientation towards tasks of the application domain to be supported by a software system has been proposed as a fruitful means for achieving more appropriate and usable systems as well as for focusing the requirements engineering process. Besides goal orientation, task orientation has therefore been recognized as a promising concept for assur...

Business process modeling notations are used in requirements engineering to specify business processes that should be supported by the system under development. Comparisons of business process modeling notations with regard to their concepts do exist, but to our knowledge, little evaluation has taken place regarding their effectiveness and efficien...

The increasing awareness about the importance of requirements engineering (RE) has tempted many enterprises to invest effort in the improvement of their corresponding RE processes. Many small and medium sized enterprises (SME) have less budget and effort available for improvement work and lack the in-house competence to make the improvements on the...

Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) are considered as a powerful combination for supporting enterprise's success. While BPM addresses the (goal-driven) design, deployment, and continuous evaluation of business processes, SOA promises a supporting IT paradigm to make process applications and thus enterprises mo...

Context and motivation) The starting point for software development is usually the system requirements. The requirements, especially non-functional requirements specified in a document are often incomplete and inconsistent with the initial user needs and expectations. (Question/problem) Experience at Siemens showed us that programmers working on so...

In the requirements engineering area, it has been recognised that quality issues are essential for the success of any system development and that they should be considered right from the beginning of every project. Even though quality also plays a central role in business process management, systematic consideration of quality requirements is still...

The main phases during requirements engineering include the elicitation, specification, validation, and management of requirements in order to understand what the system must do. In the age of distributed and collaborative work, suitable tools and concepts are needed to support requirements activities in this context. Based on requirements derived...

When providing software in terms of web services, software developing organizations are faced with the challenge of identifying services that maximize the profit by fitting the requirements of as many customers as possible. They do not only have to know which features are required but also what the right functional range of a service is in order to...

Without distinguishing unstable from stable features and anticipating likely new features, building evolvability into software systems can be time-consuming and, above all, ineffective. This paper introduces a method based on a software evolution model whose goal is to help requirements engineers and product managers identify the unstable features...

The service-oriented paradigm typically separates the development of systems into service engineering and application engineering. In our opinion, these two disciplines cannot be completely separated, as otherwise, there is no assurance that services provided by service engineering can actually be used by application engineering. In this paper, we...

As enterprises become increasingly aware of requirements engineering's importance, many have been tempted to invest in improving corresponding processes. Unfortunately, many process improvement approaches for requirements engineering don't meet small enterprises' needs and are often hard to apply in small companies. The ReqMan process improvement a...

The usability and, more generally, the overall user-perceived quality of medical devices is an important aspect, which is often insufficiently addressed in the corresponding system development activities. Fortunately, the development of new standards like IEC/DIN EN 60601-1-6 is strengthening the focus on usability / user acceptance issues. This pa...

In today's world, the users of software-based products demand a lot. They want the systems to offer the needed functionality, show high performance and, at the same time, be usable and trustworthy. Especially consumer products should also offer joy to the user. The success of a software-based product strongly depends on how well the product fulfill...

It is not easy to choose a method for eliciting, detailing and documenting non-functional requirements (NFR) among the variety of existing methods. In order to explore typical characteristics of such methods, we compare two approaches which specify NFR: MOQARE and the IESE-NFR-method. Both aim at deriving detailed requirements from quality attribut...

Current research and practice in business process modeling corroborate the belief that quality issues are still not addressed with the necessary diligence here as, for instance, in the area of requirements engineering. Our position to be discussed is that the continuous traceability of quality issues could lead to more adequate processes and system...

In the digital planning process of a manufacturing plant several partners like OEM, prime contractor and further service providers are participated usually. Since the partners have partially overlapping views (electricity, mechanical structure, plant controlling) on the same plant to be produced, they have to exchange data during their collaboratio...

Convincing organizations to improve their software development processes is difficult. It becomes even more difficult for smaller firms, as they have smaller margins for improvement work and most likely lack the in-house competence to make improvements. Based on the experience from smaller and medium-sized companies, a flexible and pragmatic proces...

This chapter describes how non-functional requirements (NFR) can be elicited and documented in the context of sociotechnical systems. An approach is presented based on use cases and on quality models derived from ISO 9126, as well as general problems and challenges when working with NFR. Requirements in general and NFR in particular are subjective,...

Non-functional characteristics of products can be essential for business success and are a key differentiator between a company and its competitors. This paper presents the application of a systematic, experience-based method to elicit, document, and analyze non-functional requirements. The objective of the method is to achieve a minimal and suffic...

Requirements engineering (RE) process improvement methods typically work with explicit process models describing activities and document flow between the stakeholders involved, and with explicit document definitions. In complex, multi-project contexts, however, the RE process is better characterized as intertwining of design, negotiation, and sense...

Agile methods such as extreme programming (XP) are becoming increasingly important for the rapid development of software applications. However, there is a tradeoff in using agile methods. Often they lack in providing a systematic guidance (i.e., a sound description of roles, artifacts, and activities), and thus, require disciplined and experienced...

This chapter describes how non-functional requirements (NFR) can be elicited and documented in the context of sociotechnical systems. An approach is presented based on use cases and on quality models derived from ISO 9126, as well as general problems and challenges when working with NFR. Requirements in general and NFR in particular are subjective,...

Usability is one of several quality aspects (also named non-functional requirements) according to ISO 9126. The elicitation of those during an early phase of the development is crucial in information systems as well as in embedded systems. Despite the practical importance of usability and additional aspects like performance and maintainability, and...

Use Cases can be employed in system requirements engineering to capture requirements from an external point of view. In product line modeling, commonalities and variabilities of a family of systems have to be described. In order to support variability modeling for product lines with Use Cases, exten- sions and modifications of Use Cases have to be...

Deriving requirements and architecture in concert implies the joint elicitation and specification of the problem and the structure of the solution. In this paper we argue that such an integrated process should be fundamentally based on experience. We sketch an approach developed in the context of the EMPRESS project that shows how different kinds o...

Project managers usually have to make critical decisions based on the on time available information. They need comprehensive and easy to use utilities to gain understanding of the current project situation and to make the right decisions very quickly. Dashboards are a common mean to visualize up-to-date and important status information at the right...

This ICB Research Report constitutes the proceedings of the following events which were held during the Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ) conference 2011 in Essen, Germany. Requirements Engineering Efficiency Workshop (REEW). Requirements Prioritization for customer-oriented Software-Development (RePriCo). Workshop o...

1 Motivation und Einleitung Der Prozessmodellierung kommt im Kontext von Requirements Engineering eine wichtige Rolle zu. Zum einen wird Prozessmodellierung eingesetzt, um bestehende Requirements-Engineering-Prozesse in Unternehmen zu modellieren, mit dem Ziel, diese zu analysieren und zu verbessern. Zum anderen findet die Prozessmodellierung Anwen...

Die Beachtung von nichtfunktionalen Anforderungen (auch häufig als Qualitätsanforderungen bezeichnet) ist essentiell für erfolgreiche Projekte und Produkte. Das Vernachlässigen dieser Qualitätsanforderungen führt häufig zu gescheiterten Projekten, geringer Produktqualität, verlängerter Time To Market und hohem Rework-Aufwand. Demgegenüber stellen e...

Gegenstand des Artikels sind Aufbau und Ergebnisse eines experimentellen Vergleichs der beiden Spezifikationstechniken Use-Case Methode und Funktionale Spezifikation mit der Zielsetzung, zu untersuchen, welche der beiden Techniken für die Anforderungsspezifikation im Automotivekontext am Besten geeignet ist. Untersucht wurden Hypothesen zu den beid...