From: Andrew Gabb (agabb@tpgi.com.au)
Date: Sun Oct 05 2003 - 12:01:26 EST
Dave Bustard wrote:
> Andrew,
> Can you make the "SOME academics". I've been arguing against
> the illusion of the hard approach for at least 12 years, and teach
> requirements engineering that way.
No problem, Dave. I know that 'ALL academics' is always wrong.:=)
In fact most of the push comes from mil/aero/space developers, probably because (a) many of the lower tier developers *are* working to hard requirements pushed down to them from above as a result of the design/requirements flick-flack, and (b) they seriously *want* it to be true (and so would I).
Some academics just reflect this situation and extend lower-tier RE to higher tiers by implication (as I discussed in my paper "What requirement are you talking about"). Others really *want* RE to be mathematical or logical in nature, so they can apply their (mathematical and/or logical) knowledge and experience to RE.
Like many real work areas, RE is actually multi-disciplinary (and includes psychology and business, for example), which will always limit the ability of many academic researchers and institutions to treat the subject adequately. Unfortunately there are still very strong pressures limiting the ability of researchers either to work across disciplines or for those in different disciplines to work together. This is an unfortunate side effect of the modern academic model (it was far less pronounced 100 years ago), and its system of rewards and penalties. This is one of the reasons that chaos theory was formed 20-40 years after it should have been, even though the symptoms had been observed and ignored for decades.
Another problem is that RE is superficially very easy to understand, and tends to spawn 'instant experts', who have virtually no experience of RE (or even engineering) in practice, but apparently can launch into 'research' tasks and fill conference programs with their immature and unfocused papers.
And to round it off, I fully realise that some of the best research work in RE is being done by academics. However, most of these also have many years of experience working in the real world on real problems.
Andrew
>
> Dave
> ================================================
> On 3 Oct 2003, at 1:30, Andrew Gabb wrote:
>
>
>>This image of 'hard requirements' is an illusion, pushed on us by
>>academics and mil/aero/space developers. Apart from those way down in
>>the developer pecking order, or those living in a world of their own,
>>many of the requirements are actually negotiable, and stay that way
>>well into the project (and beyond it, believe it or not).
>
>
>
>
> ==================================================
> Professor DW Bustard
> Head of Computing and Information Engineering
> Faculty of Informatics, University of Ulster
> Coleraine, BT52 1SA, UK
> URL: http://www.infc.ulst.ac.uk/staff/dw.bustard
>
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-- Andrew Gabb email: agabb@tpgi.com.au Adelaide, South Australia phone: +61 8 8342-1021, fax: +61 8 8269-3280 ----- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To send a message to this mailing list send it to re-online@it.uts.edu.au. To unsubscribe from this mailing list, email majordomo@it.uts.edu.au with the message `unsubscribe re-online' in the BODY of the mail.
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