Reports and Papers:

1. A Methodology for Preventing Requirements Issues from Becoming Defects (1999), Vinter O., S. Lauesen & J. Pries-Heje - ESSI Project 21167, Final Report, Brüel & Kjær Sound & Vibration Measurement A/S, 2850 Nærum.

2. Improved Requirements Engineering Based on Defect Analysis (1998), Vinter O. Proceedings of the Second International Software Quality Week Europe, Software Research, San Francisco, USA. (Presentation slides)

3. Analyzing Requirements Bugs (2000), Vinter O., S. Lauesen - Bug Report Department in Software Testing & Quality Engineering Magazine, Vol. 2-6, Nov/Dec 2000. (Article and additional Web Contents)

4. Preventing Requirement Defects (2000), Lauesen S., O.Vinter - Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Requirements Engineering: Foundations of Software Quality, REFSQ 2000.

5. Preventing Requirement Defects: An Experiment in Process Improvement (2001), Lauesen S., O.Vinter - Requirements Engineering Journal, Vol. 6 No. 1, Springer-Verlag London 2001.

6. Rapport fra forbedringsaktivitet: Kravspecifikationer (1999), Vinter O., J. Pries-Heje - Brüel & Kjær Sound & Vibration Measurement A/S, 2850 Nærum.

7. Improving Software Organizations: From Principles to Practice (2002), L. Mathiassen e.a. eds. Addison-Wesley Crystal Series. Foreword by Bill Curtis.

8. Scenarios, Prototyping & Usability Tests Improve Products & Requirements (2000), Vinter O., J. Pries-Heje - Proceedings of the Eighths European International Conference on Software Testing Analysis and Review, EuroSTAR 2000, EuroSTAR Conferences, Galway, Ireland.

Requirements Engineering

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At Brüel & Kjær I was responsible for a number of software process improvement projects. Focus on some of these was to improve the requirements engineering process. The results of these will be presented below. The results of the other process improvement projects can be found via the main page.

Requirements Engineering Improvement Project - PRIDE

PRIDE (A Methodology for Preventing Requirements Issues from Becoming Defects) was a project at Brüel & Kjaer with the objective to improve the requirements engineering process based on a defect analysis of error reports from previous projects.

Introducing the requirements engineering techniques: scenarios and usability tests on early prototypes, we achieved:

• a doubling in sales for the product - compared to a product developed by the same project team for a similar market segment
• a usability which is unique in the market for those kind of products
• an almost tripling of productivity in the development of the user interface
• a 72% reduction in usability problems for new screens
• a 27% reduction in error reports

The results of the project are documented in the final report [1].

The results of the project were in a shorter form presented at e.g. QWE'98 under the title: "Improved Requirements Engineering Based on Defect Analysis" [2]. An article in STQE Magazine describes in more detail how the analysis of error reports (defect analysis) led to the selection of the requirements engineering techniques [3].

Søren Lauesen has given the results a more academic treatment, which was presented at REFSQ 2000 [4] as well as in an article in Requirements Engineering Journal [5].

PRIDE is a Process Improvement Experiment funded by EU under the ESSI programme. ESSI (European System and Software Initiative) aims at improving Software Best Practice in Europe under the EU 4th Framework (ESPRIT).

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Requirements Engineering Improvement Project - CSPI

Brüel & Kjær participated in the large Danish software process improvement project Center for Software Process Improvement (CSPI). During this project we disseminated the requirements engineering techniques that we had found effective under the PRIDE project to a number of other development projects, whereby we gained more experience with the use of scenarios and usability tests on early prototypes. The experiences have been very positive and have once again proved the efficieny of these techniques. The conclusions on the dissemination of the techniques can be summarised as follows.

Scenarios and usability tests on early prototypes are effective techniques to create better products, because they:

• Identify the real needs of customers and users
• Improve transfer of knowledge from the customer and/or the user to the development team
• Improve co-operation internally in the development team during the development life cycle
• Are cost efficient techniques
• Improve products from a customer/user perspective

The results are documented in a final report (in Danish) [6] as well as in the final report from the CSPI project chapter 18: "Improving Software Organizations: From Principles to Practice" [7]. The results have also been presented at EuroSTAR 2000 [8].

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Seminars and Presentations

I give a two day workshop titled: Improved Requirements through the Use of Scenarios and Usability Tests on Early Prototypes. The workshop will enable a project team to apply these effective techniques to dramatically improve the requirements engineering process and the resulting product.

I also give presentations on this subject varying from 45 minutes to 2 hours depending on your needs.

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