A Comprehensive Approach to Requirements Engineering
The Computer Science department is excited to have Dr. Bertrand Meyer as their Winter Distinguished Lecturer!
Schedule of Events:
1:30 – 2:00 PM Meet & Greet
2:00 – 3:00 PM Lecture
3:00 – 3:30 PM Fireside Chat
Title: A comprehensive approach to requirements engineering
Abstract: While software engineering textbooks emphasize the importance of requirements and researchers advocate the use of formal methods, the practice of requirements engineering in industry is often dismal. When projects produce requirements they often limit themselves to “use cases” and “user stories”, which are examples rather than requirements; in many cases, there is not even a requirements document, a consequence of the Agile rejection of “big upfront”. In fact, quality software requires quality requirements. This talk promotes a systematic approach to requirements, considered a software artefact at the same level as code or tests, and using a combination of techniques, both formal and informal, leading to the concept of “Multirequirements”. Against the general trend to separate the various products of software development (as illustrated for example in model-driven approaches), it lays out an integrated, seamless approach to software construction, from requirements to later stages of development, integrating the best ideas from traditional software engineering, agile methods and object technology.
The talk will include a brief review of other work with the author and colleagues on full functional correctness proofs and automatic program analysis for aliasing and frame properties.
Biography: Bertrand Meyer is professor of software engineering and provost at the Schaffhausen Institute of Technology in Switzerland and holds associate positions at Innopolis University in Russia, where he heads the software engineering laboratory as well as Politecnico di Milano and the University of Toulouse. He is also founder and CTO of Eiffel Software, based in Santa Barbara. He was previously a professor and head of the computer science department at ETH Zurich. His books have covered object technology (Object-Oriented Software Construction, Prentice Hall), introductory programming (Touch of Class: Learning to Program Well Using Objects and Contracts, Springer), agile methods (Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly, Springer) and other software engineering topics. He is currently writing a book on requirements.