This paper presents an overview of the field of software systems requirements engineering (RE). It describes the main areas of RE practice, and highlights some key open research issues for the future. 1

This article surveys techniques used in structured and object-oriented software specification methods. The techniques are classified as techniques for the specification of external interaction and internal decomposition. The external interaction specification techniques are further subdivided into techniques for the

Alignment of application architecture to business architecture is a central problem in the design, acquisition and implementation of information systems in current large-scale information-processing organizations. Current research

Information systems technology, computer-supported cooperative work practice, and organizational modeling and planning theories have evolved with only accidental contact to each other. Cooperative information systems is a relatively young research area which tries to systematically investigate the synergies between these research fields, driven by the observation that change management is the central issue facing all three areas today and that all three fields have indeed developed rather similar strategies to cope with change. In this paper, we therefore propose a framework which views cooperative information systems as composed from three interrelated facets, viz. the system facet, the group collaboration facet, and the organizational facet. We present an overview of these facets, emphasizing strategies they have developed over the past few years to accommodate change. We also discuss the propagation of change across the facets, and sketch a basic software architecture intended to support the rapid construction and evolution of cooperative information systems on top of existing organizational and technical legacy. 1.

Agents need to be able to adapt to changes in their environment. One way to achieve this, is to service agents when needed. A separate servicing facility, an agent factory, is capable of automatically modifying agents. This paper discusses the feasibility of automated servicing.

ion level of specifications Once we have given the formal models, we can qualify the abstraction degree of the specification language in the sense how much abstract its specifications can be, and so providing some information about at which points in the development process it may be used. The abstraction degree is related to the cardinality of the classes of formal models that are semantics of the specifications. The less abstract specification methods are those where [[SP]] has cardinality 1 or is just an isomorphism class. 2.6.2 Specification semantics The technique used for providing the semantics of specification language is not neutral; indeed such semantics can be given in -- A rather direct, explicit and denotational way (e.g., as done by Hoare for CSP, [19]), by exhibiting the relative class of formal models -- An indirect or implicit way, say as (1) the limit of a diagram in a category, (2) defining that two specifications are semantically equivalent iff their equality ...

Adaptive hypermedia (AH) systems that adapt themselves to the user’s characteristics generally include for this purpose a user model component. The designer has to specify different solutions for content, navigation and presentation, and define adaptation criteria. To support the development of AH applications an engineering approach is required that considers user modelling and adaptive aspects. This paper presents a Methodology for Adaptive Hypermedia Systems Development (AHDM) covering the whole life cycle of AH applications. It includes phases for the development of the user model, the adaptive interface and the dialogue component responsible for the modelling of the user’s behaviour. For each analysis and design phase an appropriate notation is proposed. Keywords adaptive hypermedia systems, user modelling, hypermedia design method, web engineering. 1

In this paper, we report on the integration of informal, semiformal and formal system specification techniques. We present a framework for system specification called TRADE, within which several well-known semiformal specification techniques are placed. TRADE is based on an analysis of structured and object-oriented requirements specification methods. In this paper, we combine TRADE with the logic-based specification language Albert II and show that this leads to a coherent formal and semiformal requirements specification. We illustrate our approach with examples taken from a large distributed telecommunication application case study, performed in the context of the Esprit project 2RARE. Key words: Object-oriented specification, formal specification, method integration 1. INTRODUCTION It is increasingly recognized that software is always embedded in a larger system, consisting of software, hardware, people, and organizational units. Correspondingly, software specification methods and t...

. This paper presents a conceptual toolbox for software specification and design that contains techniques from structured and objectoriented specification and design methods. The toolbox is called TRADE (Toolkit for Requirements and Design Engineering). The TRADE tools are used in teaching informatics students structured and object-oriented specification and design techniques, but the toolkit may be of use to practicing software engineers as well. The conceptual framework of TRADE distinguishes external system interactions from internal components. External interactions in turns are divided into external functions, behavior and communication. The paper shows that structured and OO analysis offer a small number of specification techniques for these aspects, most of which can be combined in a coherent software design specification. It is also shown that the essential difference between structured and object-oriented software design approaches lies in the separation of data storage, data ...

Innovative e-commerce ideas have often floundered on an inadequate analysis of the expenses and benefits of the idea and an inadequate integration of the required e-business processes with other business processes. We present a requirements analysis and business process design approach that focuses on the analysis of the expenses and benefits of the e-commerce idea to all actors involved. We map this value viewpoint to the available business processes of the actors and show how to derive an economically feasible cross-organizational business process design.