B.S., Physics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1997 M.S., Applied Physics, Cornell University, 2001 Ph.D., Applied Physics, Cornell University, 2003 SUBMITTED TO THE SYSTEM DESIGN AND MANAGEMENT PROGRAM IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SCIENCE IN ENGINEERING AND MANAGEMENT AT THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY JUNE 2012 © Massachusetts Instit...

This paper proposes that requirements engineering for COTS-based business systems should be flexible to cater for changes in users’ requirements during the development process. It suggests exposing in real-time the traceability of development activity to user requirements as a key mechanism to facilitate communication between the systems development and user communities. The channels of communi...

The requirements elicited from stakeholders are typically informal, incomplete, ambiguous, and inconsistent. It is the task of Requirements Engineering to transform them into an eligible (formal, sufficiently complete, unambiguous, consistent, modifiable and traceable) requirements specification of functions and qualities that the system-to-be needs to operationalize. To address this requiremen...

User requirements look at the functionality of the software product from the perspectives of the various users of that product. They define what the software has to do in order for the users to accomplish their objectives. In order to fulfill a business requirement, there may be multiple user level requirements. For example, the business requirement to allow the customer to pay for the gas at t...

The primary measure of success of a software system is the level to which it meets the purpose for which it was projected and requirements engineering (RE) is the process of discovering that purpose. The RE process includes five distinct phases: Requirements Elicitation, Requirements Analysis & Negotiation, Requirements Documentation, Requirements Verification & Validation, and Requirements Man...

Requirements Evolution is one of the main issues that affect development activities as well as system features (e.g., system dependability). Although researchers and practitioners recognise the importance of requirements evolution, research results and experience are still patchy. This points out a lack of methodologies that address requirements evolution. This thesis investigates the current u...

Software development teams are often geographically distributed from their customers and end users. This creates significant communication and coordination challenges that impact the effectiveness of requirements engineering. Travel costs, and the local availability of quality technical staff increase the demand for effective distributed software development teams. This research reports an empi...

Traditional approaches to requirements elicitation stress systematic and rational analysis and representation of organizational context and system requirements. This paper argues that the introduction of any computer-based system to an organization transforms the organization and changes the work patterns of the system’s users in the organization. These changes interact with the users’ values a...

There are many problems associated with requirements engineering, including problems in defining the system scope, problems in fostering understanding among the different communities affected by the development of a given system, and problems in dealing with the volatile nature of requirements. These problems may lead to poor requirements and the cancellation of system development, or else the ...

This paper examines the use of Bayesian Networks to tackle one of the tougher problems in requirements engineering, translating user requirements into system requirements. The approach taken is to model domain knowledge as Bayesian Network fragments that are glued together to form a complete view of the domain specific system requirements. User requirements are introduced as evidence and the pr...