Nazim H. Madhavji: An Emerging Theory on the Interaction Between Requirements Engineering and Systems Architecting Based on a Suite of Exploratory Empirical Studies

Resum:

Empirically grounded theory on the interaction between Requirements
Engineering (RE) and Systems Architecting (SA) (i.e., the way in which RE
and SA have an effect on each other) -- in terms of the human and process
factors involved -- is scattered and anecdotal. This lack of grounded
theory and deployment in practice may be affecting the way RE and SA
processes are executed which, in turn, may be having a negative impact on
project time and cost, and quality. Also, this state of affairs may be
impeding progress in the domain of RE-SA interaction. Such interaction is
orthogonal to mainstream RE and SA development where the traditional
RE-to-SA paradigm fits new development projects but breaks down in
large-scale and evolutionary development projects. Based on observations
in six empirical studies, we construct an emerging theory that describes
the impact of human and process factors on the RE-SA interaction. The
implications of the emerging theory are anticipated for practice (e.g.,
aiding execution of RE and SA processes, resource management, etc.) and
research (e.g., hypothesis forming and testing, assessing the maturity of
the RE-SA field, etc.). Finally, the constructed theory is evaluated based
on guidelines from the literature. This work was carried out in
conjunction with my doctoral students: Remo Ferarri and Ibtehal Noorwali.

Short bio:

Nazim H. Madhavji is Professor in the Department of Computer Science at
the University of Western Ontario, Canada; currently visitor at University
of Twente, The Netherlands. He has led a number of research projects in
software engineering, involving corporations such as IBM Canada, Sun
Microsystems, DMR Group, CAE Electronics, Transport Canada, Siemens
Corporation, and CRIM, and was a Principal Investigator in several
multi-university projects. He has conducted a number of empirical studies
in these companies both qualitative and quantitative. He has co-organized
several workshops satellite to conferences such as ICSE, CASCON, RE and
REFSQ. He has chaired several positions in conferences and participated in
many panels. He is the principal editor of the 27-chapter book “Software
Evolution and Feedback: Theory and Practice” with Juan F. Ramil and
Dewayne Perry, John Wiley, 2006. He has published widely in many
international scientific conferences and journals and his papers have been
ranked among the best papers of conferences.