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Papers

"A Report on a Procurement Exercise Employing Scenarios and a Requirements Pattern Language"

This research reports on the efforts made at the Health and Safety Executive to procure a new COTS application for the management of research assignments. A novel approach to the production of tender documents is explored that employs requirements patterns which produce scenarios from use cases.

“Towards a Requirements Formalism in Procurement”

Use Case modelling suffers from a lack of guidance that allows a set of Use Cases produced for the same purpose to be represented at the same conceptual level. There is tension between the Jacobson philosophy that defines Use Cases as being oriented strictly around the user and the broader hierarchy of Use Case goals approach, introduced by Cockburn. This paper seeks to bring both approaches together and show that while Use Cases have the primary function of representing users’ requirements, there exists another dimension of Use Case applicability focused on serving the needs of all project’s stakeholders.

Testing the Predictive Ability of a Requirements Pattern Language

Abstract. This paper looks at a case study in commercial procurement of an IT system to support learners on short educational courses. It compares the Use Case model created before the system was built with the Use Case model after the system was delivered. The original Use Case model was created through the application of a requirements pattern language designed to be employed during the procurement phase of an IT system. The final Use Case model was reverse engineered from the working application. The objective was to discover how accurately the original model represented the final application to provide a measure of the potential usefulness of the pattern language during procurement.

Testing a Requirements Pattern Language through Reverse Modelling

Abstract. This paper looks at a case study to reverse engineer an IT system that supports the Health and Safety Executive in making planning recommendations with respect to hazardous installations. It compares a Use Case model created from a requirements specification with a Use Case model derived from an inspection of the built system. The objective is to discover how accurately the final system could be predicted using a series of requirements patterns. Through the application of requirements patterns, it was possible to predict the functionality delivered to a high degree, which suggests this is a useful contribution to the prediction of functionality and thereby to system sizing. This work is part of a bigger project for the Health and Safety Executive investigating improvements to system sizing/effort estimation and its impact on the management of complexity.

On the Representation of an Interactive Workpiece Problem with Requirements Patterns

Abstract. This paper describes a pattern language useful in rapidly producing a set of Use Cases for the representation of user requirements. The language is appropriate for problems that fall into the composite frame category of Interactive Workpiece problems. Such problems can also be characterized as representing business applications supported by databases. For an organization interested in institutionalizing a program of reuse, this work is relevant in that it adds to the ability to represent problems such that appropriate solutions may be more easily identified. The pattern language has been applied successfully for the purpose of improving commercial procurement. In this paper, the individual patterns of the language are presented with examples of their realization.

A Report on Applications of the Use Case Points Method in Industry

Abstract. This report examines issues intrinsic to the application of the Use Case Points Method of top down algorithmic effort estimation in the early stages of the development lifecycle. It begins by setting the method into context, suggests modifications that make it easier to apply, and examines the prerequisite that different Use Cases should be comparable by ensuring they are expressed at the same level of abstraction. Progress is reported on two applications of the method and the tests being undertaken designed to test whether the method is a good predictor of relative complexity.

The Rationale for OO Associations in Use Case Modelling

This paper introduces the topic of use cases for the capture and representation of requirements and then focuses on the associations between use cases. Specifically it makes clear the difference between the include and extend associations, and then goes on to argue why use case modellers should incorporate the more familiar aggregation and specialisation associations between use cases for the explicit representation of models at different levels of goal abstraction. The modelling experience reported here is drawn from a number of industrial case studies that specifically employ early lifecycle use case modelling for the purpose of improving project delivery through improvements to IT procurement.

Any academic reader unsatisfied with the information provided on this site, may apply to the principle researcher for a copy of the complete thesis. Equally commercial readers may also apply, for which a charge will be made.

Literature survey

Section one presents the case for the scale of the crisis in IT project delivery focusing on examples from the U.K. public sector.
Project Outcomes.pdf

Section two examines the procurement process for IT systems in the E.U. and the way the regulations are interpreted in the U.K. This section asserts that the procurement process itself may be implicated in project failure, based primarily on the absence of a sufficiently good requirements specification being available very early on, making the calculation of a reasonable tender response unlikely.
Procurement.pdf

Section three introduces the subject of RE as a sub-discipline of software engineering. The report suggests that it is legitimate to make comparisons between systems based on their logical function. This section continues with a discussion of use cases, and suggests ways in which they are a superior way to represent requirements. Use cases can act as a supplement/replacement for natural language requirements' expression with the trade-off that they take more time to produce.
Requirements Engineering.pdf

Section four introduces the subject of effort estimation in IT applications. This section shows that the methods that exist currently range from being unscientific to unproven. All early lifecycle bidding is done using informal methods. There are no suitable algorithmic methods for early lifecycle estimation. The UCPM of effort estimation is introduced as an approach that could be used for this purpose.
Effort Estimation.pdf

Section five is a presentation of the patterns movement in software engineering. It introduces different kinds of patterns, forms of patterns, and examples. Patterns are a device for sharing valuable information in software engineering. The notion of patterns for the creation of use case models is introduced as an approach that would make it quicker to produce use case models.
Patterns.pdf