Requirements Engineering

Methods, processes, and tools for fulfilling needs of individuals and organisations.

Requirements Engineering is essential for the planning and design of digital systems. Stakeholder involvement and validation of requirements are crucial to align systems and technologies with the needs of the stakeholders.

Our teaching enables students to conceive digital innovations. Our applied research and development produce new methods, tools, and platforms that ease, scale, and automate requirements engineering.

Our team collaborates with industrial and academic partners in projects with national and international funding. We present our research at international conferences and publish our results in recognised journals.

Topics within the Research Field

Elicitation and Communication of Requirements

We develop methods and tools that allow innovators to build systems that fulfil needs of humans, organisation, and our society. We focus on elicitation and analysis of user feedback and using videos for communication of knowledge in innovation projects.

Definition of Service and Platform APIs

We develop methods for eliciting requirements for digital services and platforms. These methods are used to define APIs that have good usability and make attractive business models possible. Our results are used for machine learning and in the Bonseyes marketplace for artificial intelligence.

Enablement of Automation and Self-adaptation

We develop services that allow automation of requirements engineering and personalization of systems to the needs of individual users and stakeholders. The services are used in digital products, the global Internet of Things (IoT) and services that help SMEs to master cybersecurity.

Development of Sustainable Systems

The topic of sustainability has gained a lot of attention. We consider requirements engineering to be critical for the development of sustainable software and systems. Our research aims at understanding what sustainability for digital systems is and how it may be strengthened.

Selected Projects

SMESEC

Small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) have become the new target for cyber-attacks. ATOS has contracted FHNW to develop a self-adapting digital advisor that allows SMEs to secure their digital offerings. SMEs use the advisor to build cybersecurity in a lightweight manner while avoiding large investments. The increased adoption of cybersecurity helps protecting the Swiss and European economy against cyber threats.

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BONSEYES

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) requires huge data archives and computing infrastructure. The Swiss SME nViso has contracted FHNW to develop the Bonseyes marketplace that allows companies to build AI pipelines collaboratively. The marketplace allows sharing investments and accelerate the development of AI systems by an order of magnitude.

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WISE-IOT

The Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to connect billions of devices. FHNW helps developing technologies to connect heterogeneous IoT deployments and automate the adaptation and personalisation of such systems on a global scale.

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SUPERSEDE

FHNW develops methods and tools that allow developers to elicit and analyse user feedback and context information. These methods and tools offer decision support for the design and evolution of software services and products.

Karlskrona Projekt

FHNW is a member of the international Karlskrona research project devoted to sustainable software and systems development. The project enables an open international community of researchers and has generated many publications in sustainable design.

Publications

Selected projects, publications and literature

Fricker (2017). From Requirements Engineering to Self-Adaptive Personalization, Keynote at the 7th IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE-Berlin), Berlin, Germany.

C. Groen, N. Seyff, R. Ali, F. Dalpiaz, J. Doerr, E. Guzman, M. Hosseini, J. Marco, M. Oriol, A. Perini, M. Stade (2017). The Crowd in Requirements Engineering: The Landscape and Challenges. IEEE Software, pp. 44–52.

Stade, F. Fotrousi, N. Seyff, O. Albrecht (2017). Feedback Gathering from an Industrial Point of View. International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE), pp. 71-79.

H. Kittlaus, S. Fricker (2017). Software Product Management: The ISPMA-Compliant Study Guide and Handbook. Springer. ISBN 987-3642551390.

Llewellynn, M. Milagro, O. Deniz, S. Fricker, A. Storkey et al (2017). BONSEYES: Platform for Open Development of Systems of Artificial Intelligence, ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers, Siena, Italy.

Guzman, R. Alkadhi, N. Seyff (2016). A Needle in a Haystack: What Do Twitter Users say about Software? International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE’16), Beijing, China.

Fricker, E. Wallmüller, I. Paschen (2016). Requirements Engineering as Innovation Journalism: A Research Preview. RE@Next! Track of 24th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE’16), Beijing, China.

Fotrousi, S. Fricker (2016). Software Analytics for Planning Product Evolution. 7th International Conference on Software Business (ICSOB 2016), Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Becker, S. Betz, R. Chitchyan, L. Duboc, S. M. Easterbrook, B. Penzenstadler, N. Seyff, C. C. Venters (2016). Requirements: The Key to Sustainability, IEEE Software, pp. 56-65.

Thümmler, A. Keow Lim, I. Holanec, S. Fricker (2106). A Methodology to Assess Social Technological Alignment in the Health Domain. Innovation and Research in Biomedical Engineering Journal 37, 4, pp. 232-239.

Fricker, K. Schneider, F. Fotrousi, C. Thümmler (2016). Workshop Videos for Requirements Communication. Requirements Engineering 21, 4, pp. 521-552.

Seyff, I. Todoran, K. Caluser, L. Singer, M. Glinz (2015). Using Popular Social Network Sites to Support Requirements Elicitation, Prioritization and Negotiation, Journal of Internet Services and Applications, pp. 1-16.