Colloquium: "Knowledge vs Specifications"

Speaker: Dr. Dusko Jovanovic, Neopost Technologies

Abstract:

"In the world of one-man programming, the programmer, like a
mathematician, uses his or her creative insights to create
mathematically sound programs. Team-based software engineering, on the
other hand, is akin to putting many minds together to engineer a single
mathematical construct. This is not an approach that has a record of
success in the world of mathematics, yet we are by necessity building
software in this manner."
[Wang, W.-L. (2002), "Beware the engineering metaphor", Communications
ACM, 45(5), pp. 27-29.]

The necessity for creating a common mindset in a (software) team is
evident. Indispensable ingredients of such a mindset are the common
(team) goal and a coherent awareness which solutions choices there are
for reaching that goal. In most cases, in a structured process-guided
development, but also in agile approaches, for "the goal" some kind of
requirements specifications are used, and for "the solution choices"
some architectural representations and available technologies are
considered. However, all too often sorting out which is which presents
itself as a non-trivial task.

The speaker has been involved for a few years in an industrial attempt
to produce a practical solution to the issue of articulating formal and
compact requirements specification for embedded systems projects, partly
by finding place and form for many other pieces of domain knowledge
relevant for such a project. In this talk the lessons learned from
cleaning poisoned requirements specifications and turning the "poison"
into valuable architecting assents will be presented, and a
generalisation of separating/connecting requirements specifications
from/to other crucial project artefact will be put to discussion.