Saturday, July 11, 2009

Requirements Engineering´s Roots

I am honored to be among the first researchers to be involved in the Requirements Engineering area. We were involved in the first RE conference as well as on the starting of IFIP W.G. 2.9.

I have recovered, and made available, a literature survey on Requirements. This survey, "A Survey on Requirements Analysis", preceded my Ph.D. thesis. The document contributed to the amalgamation of the different sources that shaped the area. I was one of the first to stress the problem of using the phrase “analysis” to denote the semantics of building requirements. The survey was popular at some point of time, as to be listed on Amazon.

The text is a collection of around 200 bibliography entries, which are summarized and briefly commented.

During the preparation for a talk I gave at Professor John Mylopoulos´s Festschrift I needed to recollect his importance to Requirements Engineering, and as such I went to reread the report. From there it was clear the importance of Mylopoulos to the area, specially because of the book “On Conceptual Modeling, Perspectives from Artificial Intelligence, Databases, and Programming Languages”. Coming back to the Survey I came to the conclusion that it would be a good idea to make it available.