CREWS

Overview

The CREWS project will develop, evaluate, and demonstrate the applicability of, methods and tools for cooperative scenario-based requirements elicitation and validation.

Objectives. As information technology is becoming an integral aspect of organisations, more stakeholders with less formal training must be involved in requirements elicitation, validation, and usage over long periods of time in a traceable manner. Effective and efficient team interaction become even more critical because systems must be continuously adapted to changing business practice and needs. Different kinds of scenarios (recorded current practice, animated specifications, use cases, illustrative examples) have been suggested to help this task but must be better understood, effectively supported, and interrelated with traditional requirements engineering methods which in themselves do not offer adequate solutions for these problems.

The CREWS project will develop four related methods and tools for cooperative scenario-based requirements elicitation and validation. Multiple stakeholders will be supported in eliciting and negotiating requirements under different perspectives from real world scenes captured in multimedia. Local natural language understanding will allow stakeholders to augment graphical requirements representations with short natural language statements. Validation will be facilitated by cooperative requirements animation, and by systematic comparison of the specification with usage test scenarios interactively generated using domain knowledge.

Approach. CREWS merges and extends two successful European research traditions. ICARUS (ESPRIT 2537) developed agent-oriented representations, essential for scalability of requirements models as well as for scenario animation, whereas NATURE (ESPRIT 6353) established comprehensive RE frameworks and theories of domain analysis, process modelling, and requirements information management.

During the first project phase, based on empirical capture of industrial needs, the CREWS project will develop and prototype the above four individual strategies of cooperative requirements elicitation and validation to achieve a technical impact in the scientific community and within Industry. The reactive nature of CREWS will be ensured by close cooperation with the Industrial Steering Committee (ICS) in four topic-centered working groups. During the second phase, the individual strategies, industrially relevant combinations of them, and the optimal embedding of the developed scenario-based techniques in existing RE methods will be systematically evaluated and improved using examples from ongoing commercial RE projects.

Impact and exploitation. Leading representatives from more than a dozen European software houses, user industries, and technology transfer organisations serve on the ISC, led by a widely known senior RE practitioner. Industrial uptake by the ISC members will be facilitated through design reviews and joint empirical studies, while broader uptake will be helped through a carefully designed Internet-based dissemination approach. Ongoing industrial uptake of ICARUS and NATURE results also paves the way for the seamless adoption of CREWS results.

Bericht für 1999

Koordiniert von M. Jarke erforschten von 1996-1999 die Universitäten aus Belgien (Namur), England (City University London) und Frankreich (Universität Paris-Sorbonne) die Verwendung von Szenarien in der Anforderungsanalyse. Außerdem wurden Methoden und prototypische Werkzeuge zur Erfassung und Validierung von Anforderungen basierend auf konkreten Verwendungsszenarien entwickelt. Die Praxisrelevanz der Forschungsgegenstände wurde durch Umfragen und Fallstudien mit rund einem Dutzend Firmen gesichert.

Informatik V bearbeitete die nachvollziehbare kooperative Erstellung von partiellen Ist-Modellen unter Einsatz von multimedial repräsentierten Szenarien. Hierzu wurden neuartige Methoden und Werkzeuge entwickelt, welche den Systemanalytiker bei der inkrementellen Erstellung, Änderung und Interrelation konzeptueller Beschreibungen mit sogenannten reale Welt-Beobachtungen unterstützen. Die erzeugten Interrelationsstrukturen dienen der Annotation der konzeptuellen Modelle, welche für die kooperative Verhandlungs- und Validierungsaktivitäten, wie z.B. formalen Reviews durch Personen mit unterschiedlichsten fachlichem Hintergrund eingesetzt werden können. (für mehr Details siehe hier)

Das letzte Projektjahr stand neben dem erfolgreichen Abschluss und Veröffentlichung der Evaluierungsstudien ganz im Zeichen der Dissemination der Projektergebnisse. Dazu wurden unter dem Namen CREWS Road Show auf Konferenzen in ganz Europa Tutorien und Software-Demonstrationen präsentiert. Des weiteren wurde in Ergänzung zu der bereits im Jahr 1998 von uns herausgegebenen Spezialausgabe der Transactions on Software Engineering von uns eine weitere Spezialausgabe des Requirements Engineering Journals veröffentlicht, in denen wiederum Ergebnisse des CREWS Projektes zusammen mit Ergebnissen anderer führender Forschungsgruppen präsentiert wurden. Des weiteren wurden die im World Wide Web unter http://SunSite.Informatik.RWTH-Aachen.DE/CREWS/ als CREWS Report Series zur Verfügung stehen 77 Veröffentlichungen mehrere tausend mal abgerufen.

Publications

2001

• B. Ramesh, Matthias Jarke

  Toward reference models for requirements traceability

  Published in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 58-93, 2001

2000

• Peter Haumer, Matthias Jarke, Klaus Pohl, Klaus Weidenhaupt

  Improving Reviews of Conceptual Models by Extended Traceability to Captured System Usage

  Published in Interacting with Computers, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 77-95, Elsevier Science, September 2000

1999

• Matthias Jarke

  CREWS: Towards Systematic Usage of Scenarios, Use Cases and Scenes

  Published in Proc. 4. Internationale Tagung Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI'99), Saarbrücken, 469-486 (1999)

• Peter Haumer, Jürgen Rack, Klaus Pohl

  Interrelating Goal Models and Multimedia Scenes: An Empirical Investigation

  Published in Fifth International Workshop on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ '99), 1999 Heidelberg, Germany, June 14-15.

• Peter Haumer, P. Heymans, Matthias Jarke, Klaus Pohl

  Bridging the Gap Between Past and Future in RE: A Scenario-Based Approach

  Published in Fourth IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering (RE'99), University of Limerick, Ireland, 7-11 June 1999.

• Peter Haumer, Klaus Pohl, Klaus Weidenhaupt, Matthias Jarke

  Improving Reviews by Extended Traceability

  Published in Proceedings of the Thirty-Second Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-32), CDROM, Minitrack on Scenario-Based System Development in the Emerging Technologies Track, Jan. 1999.

• Matthias Jarke, Andreas Becks, Jörg Köller, Christopher Tresp, B. Braunschweig

  Designing Standards for Open Simulation Environments in the Chemical Industries: A Computer-Supported Use-Case Approach

  Published in Proc. of the 9th Annual Int. Symposium of the Int. Council on Systems Engineering, Brighton, England, June, 1999

• Andreas Becks, Jörg Köller

  Automatically Structuring Textual Requirement Scenarios

  Published in Proc. of 14th IEEE Conf. on Automated Software Engineering, Cocoa Beach, Florida, 1999, pp. 271-274

• B. Ramesh, Matthias Jarke

  Towards Reference Models for Requirements Traceability

  Published in Technical Report, CREWS Report Series 99-13, RWTH Aachen, Germany, to appear in Transactions on Software Engineering, 1999

• Andreas Becks, Stefan Sklorz, Matthias Jarke

  Document Maps: Semantic Structuring of Technical Document Collections

  Published in Research Report No. CREWS-99-05, Report Series of the ESPRIT Project CREWS, Dept. of Computer Science, RWTH Aachen, Germany, 1999.

• Hans Nissen, Matthias Jarke

  Repository support for multi-perspective requirements engineering

  Published in Lyytinen/Welke (eds.): Special Issue on Meta Modeling and Method Engineering, Information Systems vol. 24, no. 2, 1999.

• Klaus Pohl, Klaus Weidenhaupt, Ralf Dömges, Peter Haumer, Matthias Jarke, Ralf Klamma

  PRIME: Toward Process-Integrated Modeling Environments

  Published in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, Vol. 8, No. 4, 343-410, 1999.

• Matthias Jarke, Stefanie Kethers

  Regionale Kooperationskompetenz: Probleme und Modellierungstechniken

  Published in Wirtschaftsinformatik 4/99, 316-325

1998

• Peter Haumer, Klaus Pohl, Klaus Weidenhaupt

  Abstraction Guides: Interrelating Conceptual Models with Real World Scenes

  Published in Fourth International Workshop on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (RESFQ), Pisa, Italy, June 8th-9th, 1998

• Peter Haumer, P. Heymans, Klaus Pohl

  An Integration of Scenario-Based Requirements Elicitation and Validation Techniques

  Published in CREWS Report Series No. 98-28, 1998

• Ralf Dömges, Klaus Pohl

  Adapting Traceability Environments to Project-Specific Needs

  Published in Communications of the ACM, Vol. 41, No. 12, December 1998

• Matthias Jarke, Tung X. Bui, J. M. Carroll

  Scenario Management: An Interdisciplinary Approach

  Published in Requirements Engineering Journal, Vol. 3, No. 3-4, 1998.

• Klaus Weidenhaupt, Klaus Pohl, Matthias Jarke, Peter Haumer

  Scenario management in software development: current practice

  Published in IEEE Software, March 1998, pp. 34-45 (Best papers from 3rd International Conference on Requirements Engineering, Colorado Springs, 1998)

• Peter Haumer, Klaus Pohl, Klaus Weidenhaupt

  Requirements Elicitation and Validation with Real World Scenes

  Published in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering: Special Issue on Scenario Management 24(12), pp. 1036-1054, December 1998

• C. Rolland, C. Ben Achour, C. Cauvet, J. Ralyte, A. Sutcliffe, N. A. M. Maiden, Matthias Jarke, Peter Haumer, Klaus Pohl, E. Dubois, P. Heymans

  A proposal for a scenario classification framework

  Published in Requirements Engineering Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, Springer Verlag, pp.23-47, 1998.

1997

• Klaus Pohl, Peter Haumer

  Modelling Contextual Information about Scenarios

  Published in Proceedings of the Third Internatinal Workshop on RequirementsEngineering:Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ '97), Barcelona, Spanien,UniversityPress Namur, 1997, CREWS Report Series 97-05.

• Matthias Jarke, Klaus Pohl, Peter Haumer, Klaus Weidenhaupt, E. Dubois, P. Heymans, C. Rolland, C. Ben Achour, C. Cauvet, J. Ralyté, A. Sutcliffe, N. A. M. Maiden, S. Minocha

  Scenario Use in European Software Organizations - Results From Site Visits and Questionnaires

  Published in CREWS Report Series, Report 97-10, RWTH Aachen, LS Informatik V, available on the WWW at http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/CREWS/reports.htm